Frankie and Stankie (9 page)

When it's mental arithmetic you all have to stand at the front of the classroom while Mrs Vaughan-Jones shouts out, ‘– and thirty-two, take away seven, times five, add fourteen, take away six, times two and –' She says it all much too quickly and she goes on for ever. At first everyone is a bag of nerves, except for Janet Camperdown and Jennifer Wilson who always get the answers on time, but soon enough everyone realises you don't have to work anything out for yourself. You just use Janet and Jennifer as prompts. That's until Mrs Vaughan-Jones decides on the odd random pounce.

Mrs Vaughan-Jones has a rule about packed lunch. She's the only teacher in the school who makes her girls eat their lunches in the classroom and she won't let anyone out to play until their lunch-box is empty. This is torment for Dinah, who can't possibly finish her lunch and anyway she's so slow that even to get halfway through means that she's never got any playtime left. She can't dump her lunch on Sally because Sally doesn't sit near her and she
can't tell her parents to give her less lunch because that way her mum might come up to the school and talk it over. She'll explain why she thinks Dinah shouldn't miss out on her playtime and why she thinks it's much nicer to eat your lunch under a tree with your friends.

Dinah knows that Mrs Vaughan-Jones hates her already, not only because she's asthmatic and prone to illness, but because of her sister Lisa. Dinah's mum once complained about Mrs Vaughan-Jones always whacking Lisa on her left hand, especially because Lisa's only got one proper hand. And she used to make Lisa come and sit at the teacher's table all day, instead of at her desk with the others. She used to tell Lisa that this was because she had to be always correcting her left-handed writing, but really it was so that she could whack Lisa every time she smudged, without even having to get up out of her chair. All this was just making Lisa smudge more than ever and she was missing not sitting with her friends. But after their mum had come up and complained about it, Mrs Vaughan-Jones just whacked Lisa more than ever. Plus she never stopped making sarcastic remarks about ‘certain people's mothers' always coming up to complain. And especially about ‘certain people's mothers' having a German accent. It teaches Dinah, right from day one, never to tell about anything that has happened to you at school.

Lisa has now moved on to nice Miss Vaizey's class, but Mrs Vaughan-Jones still makes sarcastic remarks to Dinah about her sister and her mother – even about her dad – so the whole class can hear. This is how Dinah knows she thinks their dad is a clever-dick, too big for his boots, and their mum is just a Hun foreigner who can't speak English properly. Plus both the girls are physically substandard. They should both be at the open-air school. Mrs Vaughan-Jones despises physical weakness and she has a special badge that she pins on whichever girl has a full attendance record for that term. The teacher's pet used to wear it all the time, but now it's Enid who wears it – and she just thinks it's a giggle.

Because of the packed-lunch policy, Dinah is always the last one left in the classroom, so she sits there chewing and gagging all on her own under Mrs Vaughan-Jones's beady eye. This is a form of slow torture which evidently gives Mrs Vaughan-Jones such a lot of pleasure that she doesn't mind not having any lunch-break herself.
She just watches Dinah all year. Sally is furious about it and she jumps up at the classroom window from time to time until Mrs Vaughan-Jones chases her away with one of those long poles you use for opening tall sash windows. Not only does Sally now have to eat her own lunch instead of Dinah's, but in the playground she hasn't got anyone to play with, because nobody else likes to play with her.

Anointing Top Girl is one of Mrs Vaughan-Jones's more gruesome rituals. The monthly tests mean that every four weeks the girls have to change where they sit. Every month Mrs Vaughan-Jones calls out all the results from Top Girl to Bottom Girl. She makes everyone empty their desks and then, when their name is called, they have to come and stand in line at the front of the class holding all their things. So if you're Top Girl that month, then your arms have nearly dropped off from holding all your books by the time she has finished berating the people who have come near the bottom. Finally she makes all the girls go to their new places. There is the Al row, the A row, the B, C and D rows. Each row has eight girls. Top Girl wears a huge red rosette all that month, and she has to sit at the very top of the Al row.

Each month Mrs Vaughan-Jones says the same thing to the Al row. ‘You girls are my Al ice-cream girls,' she says.

Nobody knows why she says this, until Janet Camperdown's mum explains that there used to be a brand of ice-cream in Durban that was called Al Ice-cream. Only you can't get it any more. It was something from before the war. Now all the ice-cream is called Rondi's and it's sold by black men bathed in sweat who ride around the streets ringing a bell. They have a big tricycle with a cold box on the front which is full of dry ice and you can choose between a Vanilla Wafer and an Eskimo Pie.

Dinah nearly always comes first, second or third in the monthly tests. She takes turns with Jennifer Wilson and Janet Camperdown. When she doesn't come in the first three, she's Bottom Girl. This happens when she's been off sick during the monthly tests. Then Mrs Vaughan-Jones gives her nought out of a hundred and makes her sit at the bottom of the D row all month, next to Patsy John, who is always last except for when it's Dinah.

Patsy is nice. She's popular because she's so small that the other
girls can baby her in the playground and carry her around. She's always really glad to have Dinah next to her because then she can be second to bottom instead of bottom. Patsy is a sweet, dark-eyed girl whose head is a slightly funny shape, but it's quite pleasing in a Kewpie-doll sort of way because her eyes are so big. Or maybe they just look very big, because her head is quite small. Later on, when they're having medical examinations, the school nurse writes ‘foetal alcohol syndrome' on Patsy's form. Dinah knows this because she's lined up behind Patsy in her vest and pants and she's quite good at reading upside-down. They are in a little group of sub-standard specimens that have been drawn off for special category, open-air-school consideration.

The other girls in the D row are Marion and Penny-Lou Headley, who are identical twins with sticky-out teeth who behave as if they were sharing one brain between the two of them, which tends to slow them up if they have to answer questions or work on their own. And there's Sandra Gibson, who has sores on her legs and sometimes stays away when it rains because she has only one pair of shoes; and then there's squinty Melanie, who gets into trouble all the time because her mum keeps making her have home perms when it's against the school rules and also because she's had her ears pierced. There's Aletta Engelbrecht, whose dad drives a crane in the docks, and there's a girl called Joyce van Tonder who always has a phlegmy cough. Her posture is all hunched up, because her spine is too curved, and she's got such hairy legs that it's hard not to keep on staring at them. The D row children are all really poor. They are the children of poor whites. That's except for Aletta Engelbrecht, who is obviously not white. She is a glaring example of racial misclassification.

Aletta is a pale-brown, mixed-race Afro child who ought to be classified as Coloured. She has black ringlets done in cute bunches and small dazzle-white teeth and high cheekbones. Aletta has a fantastic body like a dancer or an acrobat. She is one of those unusual children who always looks squeaky clean, trim and graceful – but these things count for nothing, because whenever the other girls gang up on her they say that she's a ‘chut'. This is a word Dinah's classmates use for a Coloured person.

Aletta will defend herself as best she can. ‘My skin's only this colour because my mother used to bath me in olive oil when I was a baby,' she says, but nobody believes her.

And Dinah knows that it can't be true, because her own skin is always deathly pale in spite of all the olive-oil baths. She hates it when Aletta is being taunted. She hates it especially because she always just pretends that nothing is happening.

Dinah's classmates say that Coloureds are worse than blacks, because God never meant the races to mix, so Coloureds are a mistake. It's like mixing blood and water. That's what people often say. And Dinah's dad, if he hears this said, likes to quip that if God hadn't intended the races to mix, he would have created their offspring sterile. ‘Like the mule,' he says. But people always just gawp at him, because what have mules got to do with it when you're having a moan about chuts? Anyway, everyone knows that maths bods are all nutty professors who talk to lamp-posts by mistake and forget to take off their pyjama trousers when they go out of the house.

Aletta is probably the girl in the class who dislikes natives most and she holds her nose just that much longer than the other girls when a Zulu gardener passes the classroom window. She does this so that everyone will know that she thinks that natives smell. But everyone already knows that natives smell, so they aren't at all impressed.

Once, when one of the chattier teachers is on playground duty, she tells the girls all about an exciting night-time break-in she and her husband have had.

‘I opened my eyes and I said to my husband, “I can smell boy!”' she says.

This was because a native boy had got in through the french windows, but then his boy-smell woke her up and so he ran away.

By the end of Class Two, once the Afrikaner Nationalists have won the 1948 general election and they've begun to tighten up the race laws, suddenly Aletta Engelbrecht isn't there any more. Nobody says anything about it. It's as if she was never there in the first place, except that she's in the front row of the Class Two group photograph, smiling broadly and showing her pearl-white teeth. Sometimes, to tell if you're white or not, a special government committee will put a pencil in your hair and, if it falls out, then you're classified as a white person. Also, you can tell if somebody's not really white, because they don't have half-moons at the base of
their fingernails. Everyone at school says this, but Dinah knows that it isn't true, because Lucy's got beautiful pale half-moons and she comes a dark-brown.

Lucy is the domestic servant. Dinah's dad has always been adamant that he doesn't want a servant, but it's hard to keep on resisting when unemployed Zulus go door to door asking for work all the time. Or sometimes they knock on the door wanting to sell you old-fashioned witches' brooms they've made, or wooden verandah chairs and a table that are all laced together so that they can carry a whole set on their heads. Lucy comes to the door one day in the company of her father, who is a wizened old man, though Lucy is a blooming, plump, busty girl, no older than fourteen. She wears a navy-serge school gymslip and girdle over a snowy-white school shirt and she has bare feet. Her father has a head ring and a gnarled walking stick and those elongated earflaps where plate-like insertions have been removed. Lucy has Zulu initiation marks on her face – inch-long vertical incisions in her cheeks, which only serve to enhance her prettiness. And Lucy is very pretty. Most Zulus are fine to look at, either thanks to their benign DNA, or because they still bear the signs of having been, within living memory, a people in control of their own lives. Lots of them don't yet have that look of centuries of settler depredation.

Both Lucy and her father speak almost no English, but manage to indicate that Lucy needs placing as a domestic worker. Once one of the Butcher Estate gardeners has been called in to interpret, Lucy's dad embarks on a speech extolling his daughter's industry and obedience. If she is not obedient, then Dinah's dad must beat her with a stick, the old man says – and he shakes his walking stick to underline this point. Meanwhile Dinah's dad is looking extra myopic and uncomfortably egalitarian. All the same, Lucy stays. Her father goes.

There is a barrack-like room for her in the servants' quarters which requires a constant supply of candles and a Primus stove that blackens the walls, since there is no electricity supply for the servants. Even the white people's bungalows are on a somewhat rickety grid, so that Lisa and Dinah are accustomed to being plunged into darkness as the sound of their dad's newest 78 r.p.m. recording – Kathleen Ferrier doing Gluck's
Orfeo
, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in
Der Rosenkavalier
– spirals strangely into silence.

Lucy is everyone's favourite. Dinah's mum, who tires easily, loves her, not only for her radiant smile and her sweet, bubbly nature, but for her amazing stamina. She polishes shoes. She polishes the red-tiled stoep. She never shows signs of exhaustion. She peels and chops. She's a big sister to the girls and, in the mornings, she gives weedy Dinah piggy-back rides all the way to the school gate. Or sometimes she'll hold Dinah's hand while carrying Dinah's school bag balanced on her head. Dinah loves the pale undersides of Lucy's long brown hands and asks her about them, but Lucy always just laughs. Zulus are forever laughing at things white people don't think are funny. It's sort of like a more dynamic way they have of smiling.

Lucy chases monkeys from the kitchen, stamping her feet and shouting
‘Hamba
!' and making loud click noises with her tongue. She crushes cockroaches with her bare feet and thinks nothing of it. Enormous cockroaches are a feature of Durban life. They will appear suddenly from nowhere, waving their feelers and making bold eye contact. They come three inches long, dark-brown and armour-plated. They manage to live anywhere. They subsist on anything, including the plaster on the walls of people's houses. They appear, feelers first, from the waste pipes of sinks and bathtubs and are more reviled than the flying ants that come in sudden swarms at nightfall, filling the air like snow in a blizzard.