Frankie and Stankie (49 page)

Mr Mynott is the school headmaster. He's a professional absentee. The school is being kept afloat by Mr Sparks with the assistance of an elderly Welshman whose name is Iain Davies. Mr Davies has a handicap in that he can't tell the black children apart.

‘They all look the same,' he wails to Dinah, who hasn't ever encountered this particular affliction before because, while white South Africans may be dedicated to a particularly unpleasant racist caste system, they've been around black people long enough to tell that they don't all look alike. The black children in Dinah's school, having sussed Mr Davies's blind spot, are always ready with their alibis.

‘Warrn't me, sir,' they say. ‘Warrn't me who done it, sir.'

Mrs Potts, the school secretary, tells Dinah that she hates the Welsh.

‘And now that they've gone and built the Severn Bridge,' she says, ‘they'll all be coming here to take our jobs.'

Mrs Potts tells Dinah that she didn't see a real banana until the age of ten. This was because of the war.

‘The greengrocers always had paper bananas,' she says. ‘Strings of them across the back of the shop.'

Dinah's class is one-third Jewish and one-third Caribbean. Among the rest, some are recent Irish immigrants and the others are indigenous English. Of the English, half are not in the class when she first comes to take the register.

“Op-pickin', miss,' the children chant when she calls out the listed names.

Dinah hasn't a clue what they mean, because she's never heard of hop-picking. She's never heard of hops. She doesn't know anything much about beer, except that back home it's called Lion or Castle when white people are drinking it. And that, in the townships, strong-minded black women brew illicit beer in holes in the ground at the backs of their shebeens. That hop-picking is a form of traditional working holiday for London's East End poor sounds to her utterly, picturesquely yesterday – like something out of Laurie Lee. Plus another thing that baffles her is when the children in her class say ‘indoors'. ‘Left it indoors, miss,' they'll say – about their gym shoes, or their dinner money, or the library book that they ought to have brought in. Dinah thinks that the classroom is indoors, so she can't see why there's a problem. But indoors means at home, of
course
, so the children sigh and roll their eyes to indicate her singular stupidity.

‘
IN
-doors, miss!' they say. ‘Left it
IN
-doors, then, didn't I?!'

Again, she's puzzled that, for poorish children, they seem to have so many nannies. Dinah has always thought that it's rich children who are cared for by nannies – but these children, it materialises, are speaking about their grannies. Their nannies are their grannies. Their nans are their grans. Plus her reading of English social class is thick with innocent pitfalls. So one day she thinks it might be nice for the children to act out the poems from
Old Possum
and Isaac will read about Bustopher Jones: the smart cat, the cut-above cat, the cat who doesn't care to visit pubs and has several gentlemen's clubs.

Isaac pauses after reading the lines.

‘My dad go to a club, miss,' he says. “E go there to weave baskets.'

This is because Isaac's father is blind. Of all the children in her class, Dinah is the most intrigued by Isaac and his smaller twin brother, Menachem. Isaac and Menachem Isaacs are Indian immigrant twins. They are not only Indian but Jewish. They've been discovered living in direst poverty in a damp basement room. There is no mother. The boys' mother is dead. So they've been taken into care. Dinah has never heard of Indian Jews, but Sam is not that surprised.

‘They've been there since the biblical diaspora,' he says. ‘They practise a caste system based on colour.'

‘
What
?' Dinah says.

The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.

So Dinah is experiencing a mild form of culture shock – and that's in spite of the common language, in spite of all those Union Jacks planted in Durban's verdant gardens. Because, for all the Coronation mugs, for all the Beefeater costumes at the fancy-dress parade and the Authorised Version in morning assembly and the acres of Mallory Towers and the great Beacon Readers and
The Public School Hymn Book
and
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
– Dinah is finding that what she possesses is a settler construct of England. A construct in which no provision has been made for Isaac and Menachem Isaacs. Nor for the hop-pickers. Nor for the obsession with net curtains. Nor has it explained to her why the
English
-English, though they all have sinks, will always do the washing up in specially designated plastic bowls that they keep inside the sink. It hasn't prepared her for the bus conductors who bawl ‘Inside only!' at her and then get furious if she goes upstairs because she thinks that upstairs is inside. It doesn't prepare her for those muddle-inducing telephone boxes that say she has to push button A as soon as she hears a voice. And then, if she doesn't hear any voice, she has to push button B. Otherwise she loses all her money.

But slowly Dinah is learning to love it. She's gradually making it her own. She loves the signs in the Underground, is always uplifted by them. ‘To the trains', they say to her. ‘To the trains'. And she's always disappointed by the ones that omit the article. Because ‘To trains' is just not in any way the same. It's an awkward proofreader's
error. It's a little bit like ‘C. Argo' where she had to blink away the full stop. Because the first is a noble exhortation which is urging her to proceed, ever onward and onward. To the trains! To the trains! To the trains! It's like being in an Eisenstein movie. The second is merely, pragmatically, directing her to go this way or that.

She likes the launderettes. She likes the street markets where the vendors shout at her, “Ow's about a bit o' ripe banana?' which always sounds a bit music-hall risqué. She likes the Anaglypta wallpaper that sits in baskets outside the DIY shops, because it looks a bit like stucco, or like some of the wood-carved coffering that Miss Byrd once taught her about. She likes the Belfast Linen and the fabric remnants in John Lewis. And she's especially drawn to any branch of the army-surplus shop. This is because of its shifting stock and its utilitarian chic. All that canvas with brass eyelet holes and those plain wooden boxes with rope handles; those galvanised wash tubs and plain donkey-grey blankets – it's like Muji before its time. Sometimes there'll be stacks of cheap white dinner plates. And sometimes – for reasons Dinah can't decipher – there'll be rows of monographed chamber pots and cut-price silver ice buckets.

She loves her walks on Hampstead Heath, because, on the Heath, all the trees are imitating Constable paintings. And then there's the light – that subtle, fluctuating English light that's forever imitating Turner. Camden Town is a place that she sees through the eyes of Walter Sickert. And on the Embankment at sunset she can see those kitsch orange dapplings on the water that are trying to look like Claude Monet. The Thames is always a turn-on for her, where those ‘walls of Magnus Martyr hold,/Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold'. Leastways, she's gone several times to take a look at the inside of the Church of Magnus Martyr, but each time she's found it locked. And she and Sam, on a trip to Greenwich, have wasted many minutes by the waterside waiting in the wrong queue. The boatman has been calling out ‘Queue here!' repeatedly. But what he's really been calling out is ‘
Kew here
!' He means that passengers should queue there for Kew. And Sam and Dinah don't want to go Kew. They want to go to Greenwich.

Then there's the grass in Regent's Park which is always incredibly green.

‘It's green because it never stops raining,' an English colleague reminds her.

And, yes, it's true that Sam and Dinah have experienced their first ever rainy picnic. The picnic has taken place in a bandstand in Wells where they look out, through the sheets of rain, on to the curious flat-topped towers of Wells's beautiful cathedral. A friend's mother has prepared the picnic. She's done cucumber sandwiches and sausage rolls and a simnel cake. Plus she's even brought along an urn so that the party can have freshly brewed tea.

‘Well,' says the friend's mother, in a manner that indicates bags of good cheer along with several decades of character building, ‘I must say, I've known many a
worse
bank-holiday picnic.'

Dinah likes it that the public holidays are called bank holidays in England. That's because they aren't commemorating an endless succession of brutal events in which white persons with gunpowder have laid waste to brown persons with spears.

Dinah is familiar with Camden Town because she and Sam are living there now – well, they're living on Primrose Hill. Because, along with Dinah's salary of forty pounds a month, Sam has now got a student award which adds another fifty pounds. So they've done their sums and they've found the flat: a small unfurnished affair. They do their shopping in Camden Town, mostly in Inverness Street. And sometimes, for a shop in the same little street, Dinah makes stuffed toys and children's clothes to supplement their income. She's got herself a part-time job due to start at the beginning of the autumn term. It's in one of the new comprehensive schools and she'll be teaching adolescents. This is so that she can sign up as a graduate student as well.

It's bliss for Sam and Dinah to be on their own in the flat. It's June and it's suddenly summer. Everyone is saying it's the best summer they can remember. Sam and Dinah spend the long evenings lazing in Regent's Park and sometimes they take themselves to the open-air theatre that's inside the park. They're enchanted by the length of the days, because in Durban the big orange sun will slide with speed behind those bottle-green hills and then it will be night. Whilst here, in London, people are still playing tennis at ten o'clock.

Between them, Sam and Dinah have once again acquired two cats. Two pale-gingers – Bart and Mattie lookalikes – so they're
happily playing house. Dinah's cat comes from a pet shop in Dalston Junction. Sam's cat is from Camden Town. And, because they've got a paragon of a landlady, she doesn't mind about the cats. She doesn't even mind when the cats have kittens. Which they do, because Dinah's cat, quite unbeknown to her, is a rare and precious thing. She's a female marmalade, when the proper equivalent of marmalade in a girl is tortoiseshell. So that when the kittens are born, not only are they all marmalade, but three of the four are girls.

‘Well,' says the landlady. ‘Three ginger girls! Why is that, do you think?'

But Dinah has no idea. ‘I don't know why it is,' she says. ‘It's just one of the wonders of the world.'

In being able to make sense of the racially stratified world in which Dinah de Bondt grows up, I have had the good fortune, first to have grown up in that context with parents who held dissenting views, and then to have spent the past forty years in the company of Stan Trapido, whose vast knowledge of South Africa's history, along with his astute and original takes on it, have not only inspired a generation of younger historians, but have always been of benefit to me in coming to understand the country of my past.

I could not have written this book without the enriching effects upon my early life of three remarkable women: Elaine O'Reilly, Suzanne Gordon and Frances McDonald. And on the subject of remarkable women, I have, throughout the writing, had the support and conviction of Victoria Hobbs, my agent, and that of my editor, Alexandra Pringle, in the face of whose special qualities words tend to fail. There is only one of her and not every author can have her, so I count myself particularly blessed. In conclusion – and I emphasise conclusion – my thanks to Iris Murdoch.

Barbara Trapido, Oxford, 2003.

In a world where terminology is a minefield, no term is more problematical than Coloured because, while this is highly offensive to any British person who isn't frozen in the 1950s, it is inescapably the term used by certain groups of South Africans about themselves: people who, culturally, ethnically and historically, do not see themselves as black.

BARBARA TRAPIDO
Frankie & Stankie

A READING GUIDE

In brief

Dinah de Bondt is born in a lift trapped by a wartime power cut while her sister screams blue murder in her crib all alone at home. The child of white liberal parents, the weedy, arty little girl grows up in a South Africa increasingly politicised by draconian race laws until, newly graduated, she flees to London with her dissident husband.

In detail

In
Frankie & Stankie
Barbara Trapido returns to her South African roots with a highly autobiographical novel which tackles one of the most divisive political issues of the twentieth century as she tells the story of Dinah growing up in 1950s South Africa. Using simple straightforward language, Trapido wields humour to great effect in exposing the lethal combination of prejudice and ignorance.