WHITE THORN

Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia and The Persimmon Tree.

The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries.

BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY

The Power of One

Tandia

April Fool’s Day

A Recipe for Dreaming

The Family Frying Pan

The Night Country

Jessica

Smoky Joe’s Cafe

Four Fires

Matthew Flinders’ Cat

Brother Fish

Whitethorn

Sylvia

The Persimmon Tree

THE AUSTRALIAN TRILOGY

The Potato Factory

Tommo & Hawk

Solomon’s Song

Also available in one volume,

as The Australian Trilogy

WHITE THORN

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BOOK ONE

TRUE LOVE CAME TO me one crisp late autumn morning when the sky had lost the faded blue of the long hot summer and taken on the deeper colour of winter yet to come. I discovered it in a hessian sack floating down the bit of a creek that ran around the back of the orphanage. I waded into the shallow stream, the water reaching to just below the hem of my khaki shorts, the current pulling at my skinny legs. The stream, already icy from the high mountains, was extra cold from the frosty morning, so that I inched and ouched my way towards the floating sack, grabbed hold of it and drew it back against the current to finally rest it on the bank of wet black pebbles.

I untied the bag, no easy task I can tell you, the twine binding was knotted and slippery wet and my fingers near frozen. I peeped into the dark interior and, unable to see what it contained, up-ended it. To my surprise out plopped six dead puppies. Flippity-flop! Oh my Gawd!

With six dead dogs on my hands I knew I was in big trouble. What if someone came upon me and there were these dead puppies lying at my feet? I hastily dropped each one back into the sack, ready to return it to the stream. But as I grabbed the last one, the smallest of them all, it seemed to quiver and its mouth opened and gave a sort of gasp, so I gave it a bit of a squeeze and it vomited a jet of water. I squeezed it again and more water came out. One back leg started to jerk, I squeezed a third time and it must have been empty because nothing happened, except that it started to breathe.

Well, you can’t just put a nearly dead puppy back in the sack and hope for the best, can you? So I took him beyond the shade of the overhanging mimosa and laid him down in a patch of sunlight. Then I quickly retied the bag and dragged it back to the stream and watched as the current caught it and it floated away around a rocky corner and was soon out of sight. I must say I was glad to see the last of it, five dead puppies lying at your feet is no way to start a morning. But then it struck me that a live puppy was going to be a lot more trouble than a dead one. How was a little kid in an orphanage where you were not allowed to have anything of your own going to look after a puppy?

Suddenly my life had become very complicated. I sat in the warm sun beside the puppy, stroking its pink tummy, which by now was pumping up and down thirteen to the dozen as it came truly alive and started to get warm again. I was accustomed to getting into trouble, mostly because of my surname, Fitzsaxby. I was English, well, that’s what my name said I was anyway, and I was in the Deep North, high mountain country, Boer territory where the English were hated because of what they’d done in the Boer War. They’d started the world’s first concentration camps and filled them with Boer women and children from the farms; many came from these mountains. That wasn’t the bad part. The reason they hated the British was because 27 000 of them died of dysentery and blackwater fever and other terrible and unsanitary things. In a way, it was understandable that they hated me for being English, you don’t forget things like what happened to your own ouma so easily, do you?

I picked up the still wet puppy and clasped him to my chest and he began to suck on my thumb and whimper. There was no doubt he was properly alive again and I had acquired a problem too big for a six-year-old boy’s brain. All of a sudden it struck me, my friend Mattress, the pig boy, would know what to do.

Mattress was my friend even if he was a grown-up. If you’re black you get called ‘boy’ even if you’re an old man, you can be a garden boy, kitchen boy, farm boy, house boy or a pig boy like Mattress, because he looked after the orphanage pigs and also worked with the cows in the dairy. I can tell you, having a friend like him was good because having friends in that place wasn’t easy when you had an English name. Nobody wanted to be the friend of the rooinek, which is what they called you if you were English. It means redneck. One thing was for sure, the concentration camp business never went away but was always pointing a finger at you. Rooinek, you are evil! God is going to punish you and you are going to hell, you hear!

This is what happened to the Boere. I know it’s true because on Sundays when we had to attend church the preacher stood up in his long black robes with a little white starched bib under his chin, it must have been there to catch the spit when he got angry with the English. Which is what he did every Sunday morning without fail. He got all worked up and thumped the pulpit and started going on and on. Soon he’d be red in the face and spit came flying out of his mouth and sprayed onto his beard that almost covered the entire bib, so after all that trouble to wear it, the bib wasn’t any good for catching spit. At first I would get really frightened, me being the only Englishman in the congregation and him saying I was the devil’s children. Not me personally, he didn’t point to me, but I guess it amounted to the same thing. All the other kids would turn and look at me and the guys on either side of me would give me a sharp dig in the ribs and whisper verdomde rooinek, damned redneck.

But then I worked out a scenario that went like this. The preacher, who in Afrikaans is called a Dominee, had this big round head with jet-black hair that was parted down the centre and was plastered down on his head with grease so that it looked just like a shiny beetle’s back. He also had ears that stuck out like small saucers on either side of his head. With the light coming from a window at the back of the pulpit they’d glow. As he got more and more worked up over the English and the concentration camps, his ears looked like red lights glowing on the sides of the beetle’s back. He had beady little obsidian eyes that disappeared into bushy eyebrows while the rest of his face was covered with that large black beard that came way down to the centre of his chest. So, after we’d sung a few hymns and Dominee De Jager arrived at the pulpit carrying a big Bible under his arm with pieces of white paper sticking out to mark his places, I’d be ready. I’d sort of narrow my eyes and concentrate really hard on the top part of his head so that it became the big black beetle with large red ears and tiny hard shiny black eyes. The beetle would be busy chomping on a lush crop of black beard. Suddenly he was no longer a huge frightening preacher man condemning my kind to hell, but instead became ‘The Great Scarlet-eared Beard-chomping Black Beetle’. After that I wasn’t frightened of him any more.

The Boer War happened in the 1890s when the English fought the Afrikaners because they wanted the gold that people all of a sudden were finding all over the place. The Boere said no way and the war went on for ages, the Boere on horseback in commandos and the British in regiments on foot. The Boere would attack and could shoot the eye out of a potato at a thousand yards with their German Mauser rifles while the British with their Lee-Enfield rifles couldn’t fire accurately at that distance and besides they were mostly lousy shots because they weren’t born on the veld. Then the Boere would gallop away, and at night every once in a while they’d sneak back to their farms to get food and stuff so they could fight the enemy on the run for the next week or so. It was biltong mostly, which is dried meat cured in the sun and you can live on it all week with a bit of flour or mielie meal thrown in. What the Boere did is called guerilla warfare and the British didn’t like it one bit. It was like chasing galloping shadows. Even though the English outnumbered the Boer soldiers fourteen to one, they weren’t winning the way they expected to, them being the British Empire and all that. So they came up with an evil plan called ‘a scorched earth policy’. They burnt down all the farms and put all the Boer women and children in concentration camps where they died like flies.

Anyway, that’s what the Dominee said happened and that’s why it was impossible for any of the Afrikaner kids to be my friend. But Mattress didn’t seem to mind and said that black people were accustomed to being hated by the Boere and that I could be his friend if I wanted. He said both his grandfathers had fought the British and the Boere and if they hadn’t had guns the Zulu warriors would have beaten the pants off them and nearly did anyway. So he didn’t give a shit because they were both bastards (present company excluded) and the Zulu Impi were, man for man, the best of the lot and would march over a cliff and fall to their certain death to show how brave they were. ‘Ahee, Kleinbaas, when they attacked, the earth trembled and it was like thunder in the mountains.’ I didn’t tell him I thought that marching over a cliff was a bit stupid, but it certainly showed they were brave.

Now I don’t want you to think all Boere are bad because they are not, they can be very good and kind people, it’s just that they have a right to hate the English and I just happened to be one. I don’t know how it happened because I was an orphan, but there you go, it was an accident of birth and nobody could do anything about it.

In an orphanage there’s a lot of unkindness going about even for the Afrikaner kids, it’s called discipline. It was just that I got a bit extra from the kids as well for having a name like Fitzsaxby that couldn’t be made to sound Afrikaans, no matter how you said it. They didn’t like to say my surname so they called me Voetsek, which is an Afrikaans word that you yell at a strange dog if it comes up to you. You give it a kick and you say ‘Voetsek!’ and every dog knows the word and runs away. It means ‘bugger off’ in dog language, only a bit worse. It’s not a very nice thing to happen to a person’s name but it was another thing I couldn’t do anything about.

You’ll probably think Mattress is a funny name for a person, but when you look at it through his eyes there isn’t a lot of difference between Matthew and Mattress. He liked the sound of Mattress better. When I told him a mattress is something people sleep on he shook his head, ‘Ahee, Kleinbaas, I am not sleep on this thing, I am Zulu and must have a grass mat.’ Besides, Mattress sounds much better than Matthew because it doesn’t have the ‘phew!’ sound in it. Anyway, that’s what I thought and, besides, it was a whole lot better than Voetsek.

Mattress sat on the low stone wall of the pigsty with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands and listened intently while I explained my problem to him in Zulu.

‘Ahee, Kleinbaas, we have a big, big problem here.’ He dropped one hand to rest on his thigh and rubbed his chin. ‘That dog is too small.’

‘No, it is too small to feed on its own. Look, its eyes are not yet open, it must have milk from the bitch and where is she, eh?’

I shrugged and pointed to a higher part of the mountains. ‘Up there, he came downriver.’

‘Can we find this bitch?’ I asked hopefully. ‘You could go and take a look?’

‘Intentional murder.’ He pointed to the puppy cradled in my arms. ‘If we find the bitch the Boer will murder the dog all over again. He didn’t want those dogs.’

‘That’s all very well but what are we going to do?’ I said, shifting the responsibility onto Mattress, the way white people are allowed to do with black people any time they like.

He didn’t reply for a long time and you could hear him thinking, Ahee! What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? I could almost hear it going round and round in his head like things sometimes go in mine when I’m in the deep shit. ‘Voetsek, you in the deep shit, man,’ one of the boys would say when something went wrong in the dormitory and I was going to be the one they were going to blame and I didn’t know why I was guilty. Deep shit… deep shit… deep shit, the words would go round and round. I preferred just getting the sjambok rather than having all that deep shit running around in my head.

All of a sudden Mattress’s eyes lit up and he clapped his hands and laughed. ‘The sow! We’ll put him with the big black sow, she won’t know the difference.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, uncertain. The big black sow wasn’t completely black but black and white just like my new dog and she weighed about 300 pounds. What if she rolled over all of a sudden and my little dog, which probably weighed less than a pound, was in the way? He couldn’t even see to jump out of the way.

The sow had twelve piglets that were two weeks old who never let up fighting over the ten available teats, the two left out would squeal like billyo, snuffling and pushing and carrying on a treat until they pushed someone out of the way and got a go. They had fat round bums and curly tails and already they were three times the size of my new dog. I can tell you it was everyone for themselves in that pigsty, just like it was in the orphanage and I didn’t like his chances. Frankly, I didn’t think much of the solution, how does a puppy that can’t even see compete with twelve piglets fighting over ten teats?

‘Are you sure?’ I asked again, holding up the puppy who was now whimpering and no doubt very hungry. ‘Wouldn’t he be squashed?’

Mattress thought for a moment. ‘We’ll give the dog a free go,’ he said at last.

‘We’ll take some of the piglets away from the sow, give her a chance on her own to get a good feed until she’s old enough to fight back.’

He clapped his hands and took a step closer and took my puppy by the tail and lifted its bum and hind legs. ‘See, no snake, we got ourselves a bitch, Kleinbaas.’

I took a look for myself and Mattress was right, he was a she all right. All of a sudden everything was going wrong. Even at six I knew female dogs have babies and mongrel puppies in an orphanage wasn’t possible. I’d just seen an example of what happened in the bottom of that sack. Even having a dog of my own wasn’t going to be possible, but a bitch was totally out of the question.

He nodded. ‘Ahee, woman, always trouble,’ he agreed. He paused as if thinking. ‘Shall I wring her neck?’ He brought his big black fists together, turned them in opposite directions and made a sort of cluck that sounded like a bone breaking.

‘No!’ I yelled. My vehemence was so strong that my whole body trembled and my knees began to shake.

‘I’m going to keep her,’ I said fiercely, my voice close to a sob. ‘She’s mine forever!’

He didn’t tell me that was impossible, which it was, he just said, ‘In that case you’ll have to give her a name.’

‘Tinker,’ I said, not knowing why or where the name came from, it was something deep down from an unknown past, but plain as anything, sounding in my head like a stone shot from a catty striking a tin can.

‘Ah, Ten-Kaa!’ Mattress said approvingly, splitting her name in half and softening it, because you can’t say hard sharp words in the Zulu language.

With her name out of the way I became all business, names give an identity and now Tinker was definitely here to stay.

‘Soon see, Kleinbaas.’ He swung his legs over the pigsty wall where a whole heap of grunting and sucking and squealing was going on. Pigs are not exactly silent types.

‘Hey, look, Kleinbaas,’ he laughed and pointed to Tinker. ‘Same like her.’ He said it in Zulu and what he meant was that the sow and piglets were black and white and so was Tinker. ‘The sow won’t know the difference.’

She’d have to be pretty dumb, I thought to myself. Tinker was about a sixth of the size of the greedy piglets. It was obvious she stood no chance if she was going to have to compete for the sow’s milk.

The enormous sow lay on her side in the muddy pigsty, her great belly heaving, flies buzzing around her eyes, flicking her ear to chase them away. Every few moments she’d give a deep grunt, but you couldn’t tell if it was because she was happy or was simply putting up with the squabbling going on down below. Looking at it from her point of view you had to wonder. Twelve piglets pushing each other aside to have a go, their snouts concertinaed right up into their foreheads. Each sucked like there was no tomorrow in an attempt to get as much scoff as they could before being bumped aside. It can’t have been all that comfortable for her. Pigs don’t muck about when it comes to food, that’s for sure. I suppose it was the same at the orphanage, if you didn’t cradle your plate within your arms and scoff it as fast as possible, the food on it soon disappeared into someone else’s mouth.

I keep calling it ‘the orphanage’ and that sounds pathetic, as if it was in the olden times or something, whereas the time was 1939 with everyone saying there was going to be a war with the Germans. The English against the Germans and you can guess who wanted to fight for the Germans. More about that later. The real name for the place was ‘The Boys Farm’.

It was in the country, about four miles out of a small town known as Willemskrans, which means the Williams Cliffs. This was because it was in the Lebombo Mountains and the town snuggled against a mountainside and was slap-bang up against these tall, rocky cliffs that rose nearly a thousand feet upwards. People said that the climate and the flora and fauna at the top were different to those at the bottom. I wondered how this could be. Mattress said that the people who lived up there were a different tribe. One big cliff and all of a sudden everything changes, the trees, flowers, climate and the people. Maybe Tinker came from up top and she’d come down the Letaba River. This was improbable because she’d have to have fallen down some mighty waterfalls. To do this and to be still alive would be some sort of a miracle, so I guess she came from some place not too high up, where the creek started.

Anyway, The Boys Farm was on twenty acres with its own vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, ten milking cows and a small dairy for making butter, there were also two donkeys to pull the small hand plough used for tilling. There was talk of a second-hand tractor but it never came to anything. Lots of things never came to anything in that place. We all worked in the vegetable garden and the older boys chopped wood and milked the cows.

What we did was usually considered kaffir work. But they decided that we’d all grow up to work on farms or as motor mechanics, timber cutters, lorry drivers or maybe get an apprenticeship to be a carpenter or boilermaker in the mines. We had to learn early to do things around the place with our hands, as brains were not considered a high-up commodity. It’s funny when you don’t belong to anyone that the people responsible for looking after you just assume you’re nobody. You are the Government’s children and they can do as they wish with you. So they train you to be the lowest common denominator, except, of course, for the blacks. You definitely can’t be allowed to be as low as a black kaffir. So pigs are definitely not a white man’s work, they’re stinking creatures that live in mud and their own shit that gets squished up together to make a fearful greeny-black mud paste that stinks so much that you have to hold your nose as you approach. Even an orphan boy couldn’t be expected to work in the pigsty, which is why we had a pig boy. Although I must say, I got used to the pigs’ smell and didn’t mind it. Mattress said that if humans lay around in their own shit they’d smell just as bad as the sow.

Mattress moved over to the sow, the greenish black stink-mud squelching between his toes. He had very large feet because he was a very big man and they were almost worn out. If they’d been shoes they would have needed to be thrown away long ago. The soles of his feet were about an inch thick and were splayed out with deep cracks running down the sides. It was as if he walked on an old pair of really thick leather soles about an inch and a half wider than the top part of his foot. This callused platform of hard, rough skin looked like it was glued to the underpart of his feet. He’d once explained this had happened from his having been a herd boy in the mountains when he was about my age.

‘Kleinbaas, I was a herd boy in the mountains of Zululand and the small boys looked after the village goats. Goats like to be on the high slopes and on the rocks and they’ve got you jumping from rock to rock and running and slipping and sliding down the razor-sharp shale. Soon you’re bleeding and sore and when you get back limping to the kraal at night the old men sitting under the marula trees laugh and say, “Umfaan, you are not a herd boy’s arsehole until the bleeding stops and the hard skin comes”.’ Mattress laughed at the memory. ‘Slowly, slowly, the soles of your feet grow hard.’ He pointed proudly to his feet. ‘And then when they get like this you know you have beaten the mountains and the rocks and the wicked whitethorns and the shale that cuts like a knife.’

Mattress made me see that having feet like his could be a very big advantage in life because you didn’t need boots and could go anywhere you liked.

As he walked over to the sow she looked at him with a suspicious eye and grunted a warning a bit louder than usual but otherwise didn’t move. Pigs can be dangerous and a sow protecting her young is not to be trifled with. She must have known Mattress because she didn’t seem to mind when he picked up four piglets by the tail, two in each hand, and walked over and dumped them over the short stone wall into a vacant pigsty next door. Boy! You should’ve heard the squealing going on! This left two teats vacant. He turned, walked over to me and reached over the wall and took Tinker from me. The tiny, sightless puppy seemed to disappear within his large hands. With each piglet having a teat to itself the remaining piglets were going at it hell for leather and didn’t even see Mattress placing Tinker next to a vacant teat. I waited anxiously as Tinker’s nose bounced against the huge teat that was bigger than her nose. At first she didn’t seem to know what to do but Mattress held her against the pig’s great pink teat and sort of rubbed her nose on it and a small drop of yellowish milk came out. Tinker was on it like a shot. Her tiny mouth opened and I don’t know how she got that big sow’s teat into her mouth but she did, and then she hung on.

‘Ahee! The mighty one!’ Mattress exclaimed, clapping. ‘She is a lioness this one. She will survive!’

I can tell you I was very relieved. But then disaster struck, one of the piglets let go of his own teat and wanted Tinker’s.

Mattress did no such thing and Tinker was sent rolling into the stink-mud. Mattress laughed and picked her up. ‘She must learn that life is hard, Kleinbaas,’ he explained, but then he moved the piglet away and placed it back on its former teat and reinstated Tinker. It happened again. This time Tinker was sent sprawling against the wall near where I was standing and she gave a yelp and at that very moment, lying on her back, trying to get to her feet, her eyes opened and she looked straight into mine. I was the first thing she saw in her life, and I can tell you it was love at first sight. Her and me, from now on we were in this together, Tinker and Tom, a deadly combination in the making.

Mattress picked her up again. ‘Back you go, little lioness,’ he said and placed her on the spare teat. This time she had a good feed, sucking for dear life, her tiny jaws working overtime, the sow’s rich milk running from the corners of her mouth. After a while you could see her tummy grow as big as a tennis ball so we knew she’d had enough.

‘The sow’s milk is good, Kleinbaas,’ Mattress said, handing Tinker back to me. ‘She will grow strong and soon she’ll be eating inyama,’ which means meat in Zulu.

The next problem was accommodation and here Mattress wasn’t to prove very helpful. ‘Can Tinker live with you in your kaya?’ I asked him.

He sat down on the pigsty wall and sighed heavily, looking down at his cracked feet, unable to meet my eyes. ‘This thing, it is not possible, Kleinbaas, the Big Baas Botha will not allow it. He will say I have a kaffir dog and they are not allowed here. We cannot have such a dog in this place, he will wring her neck.’

I should explain the word ‘kaffir’. It was used like the word ‘nigger’ was used in America, which wasn’t very nice, so a kaffir dog was something that whites thought was pretty bad. Even I was shocked at the idea of Tinker being thought of as a kaffir dog.

‘Oh, but she is not a kaffir dog!’ I protested. Kaffir dogs were thin and scrawny with their ribs showing, they skulked around with their tails between their legs and with sores showing through their mangy pelts. They understood Voetsek very well and couldn’t look you in the eye. Tinker wouldn’t grow up to be like one of them.

‘We cannot have a dog in this place, we are black.’ Mattress said it without sadness, just sort of resigned. I knew he was right, we had rules in The Boys Farm and he had rules as the pig boy and you simply couldn’t go against the rules, no matter what. ‘I will lose my job,’ he said.

I wanted to cry but what use would that be? Crying never solved anything and, besides, I wasn’t much good at the business of blubbing. It was bad enough being English but if they saw me blubbing all over the place they’d really have a go. I did what crying it was impossible to avoid at the big rock where nobody ever came except me. Then it struck me. I would keep Tinker at the rock, it had plenty of overhang and I could make her a sort of burrow underneath and every day take her to the pigsty for a feed. She’d be okay while I was at school, and when she got a bit bigger I would build a stone enclosure under the overhang where she could play when I wasn’t around or had to work in the vegetable garden.

I felt pretty cheered up as I outlined this plan to Mattress, although from his expression I could see he seemed less than convinced. He nodded gravely and said maybe it was a plan that could work and that he was very sorry about not being able to help, but jobs were hard to come by and he had to send money back to his wife in Zululand.

I was amazed to think that Mattress had a wife and that I didn’t even know about her, but there you go, white people didn’t spend much time asking black people about their lives, so Mattress was just the pig boy and didn’t exist beyond his immediate occupation. I had fallen into the same white-people-total-disinterest-in-black-people trap, and even at six years old I felt ashamed.

His face lit up. ‘One boy same like you, already he is with the goats and his feet I think they will soon be hard and will not bleed.’

‘Mkiti Malokoane, but he also has a white man’s name, it’s Joe Louis, same like Joe Louis the mighty fighter who is Amabantu.’ Mkiti means ‘Big Feast’ and Malokoane was Mattress’s surname. I confess that I’d never heard of Joe Louis the boxer and thought he must be someone from Mattress’s tribe. But not long after Meneer Frikkie Botha, who was Mattress’s boss and who looked after the farm but was also the boxing coach, was answering a question from one of the boys, Fonnie du Preez, who was the best boxer at The Boys Farm. The question was, ‘Why are American kaffirs like Joe Louis such good boxers?’

There was the name again, so I listened to the answer. ‘Ag, that Joe Louis is good, but he was knocked out by a white man, a German, Max Schmeling. With those American kaffir boxers they all one-punch Johnnies, you hear. Then they come across a white man with brains who can really box and it’s, “Good night, lights out, hear the dicky bird singing, kaffir!” Mostly those black guys they got glass jaws, man!’

I thought that I’d better not tell Mattress that Joe Louis had a jaw that was made of glass and what happened to him, because I didn’t want him to be disappointed and maybe think he should have called his son Max.

Much later on I heard that it must have just been a lucky punch from Max Schmeling that knocked Joe Louis out, because the next time they boxed Joe knocked out Max in the first round. Meneer Botha didn’t tell us that bit or that Joe Louis stayed Heavyweight Champion of the World for ages afterwards. So Mattress had every right to be proud and name his son after the great boxer. All this had happened already and Meneer Botha must have known it at the time. But he didn’t tell us, did he? He just made us think that Schmeling was the white hero that beat the black bastard. Which goes to show you have to find out about a person yourself and not listen to all the badmouthing going on all over the place. In life you can’t just take the part of a story that suits the way you think and leave the other stuff out.

‘I will help you find some rocks to make a home for the little lioness,’ Mattress offered kindly. But I knew he shouldn’t because if Meneer Botha caught Mattress helping me beyond his pigsty and dairy territory it could mean big trouble for him. Meneer Botha wasn’t kind to black people and always referred to them as black kaffirs and even sometimes as baboons.

‘It’s okay, I can do it myself,’ I said and I could see Mattress was relieved.

‘She is only a very small dog,’ I replied. ‘There are lots of small rocks around.’

So I dug a sort of burrow under the big rock and found some old mielie sacks to keep her warm and this became Tinker’s home and at night I’d close it using an old cut-in-half four-gallon paraffin tin so nothing could get at her.

For a while all went well and the weeks passed and I’d take Tinker for a feed in the morning before going to school and then again when we returned to the farm. Soon she was a fat, happy puppy jumping up and down and being very playful. She was still on the sow’s teat but now she was the boss. Even though she was a lot smaller than the piglets they soon learned to stay away from her because she’d grab them by the tail or an ear and hang on for dear life. The piglet would try to shake her off to no avail and squeal blue murder. Mattress said that Tinker the lioness was learning to survive in the jungle. I began saving crusts for her from our breakfast bread and Mattress cut a jam tin in half and he’d bring her milk from the dairy when she was old enough not to need the sow’s teat.

When things go well you tend to grow careless and I was taking Tinker for walks well away from the big rock when one day we turned a corner and there stood Pissy Vermaak with his knobbly knees and snotty nose and sort of caved-in chest.

‘You jus’ found him?’ Pissy said suspiciously. ‘He jus’ came walking along all of a sudden, hey?’

I nodded. I was still learning to lie and wasn’t very good at it yet. All this lying was getting me deeper and deeper into the shit. Pissy wasn’t someone I needed to be afraid of, as he couldn’t fight or anything, even though he was ten years old. He’d got his name when he was smaller and used to wet his bed. He was dangerous though because he had a reputation for reporting things to Mevrou, the matron. He had this bad chest and had to go to her every night to get medicine and that’s when he’d tittle-tattle. He’d tell her about the things that went on in the dormitory and other places so that before you knew it Mevrou called you in and you got six of the best with the sjambok. Nobody liked Pissy for that reason and also, he always smelled of piss, his skin when you got near smelled like piss when it has been standing in the chamber-pot all night. People said that he could have fits ‘out of the blue’ if he got a fright or was beaten or something like that, although it had never happened while I’d been there. Maybe his smelling of piss had something to do with him having out-of-the-blue fits. He had ginger hair and lots of big brown freckles and his skin where he wasn’t sunburnt was pale pink, all of which was unusual for an Afrikaner.

‘He’s yours, isn’t he, Voetsek?’ Pissy bent down and picked up Tinker who was too small to know she was in enemy hands. ‘I think I’ll have him, take him for me.’

Pissy Vermaak laughed. ‘Ja, man, I thought so all the time. I’m going to tell on you, Voetsek. Wait till Mevrou hears what you been doing, hey.’

He mustn’t have heard when I first called Tinker a she and now his expression changed to one of alarm. ‘Sis, man! A bitch dog! She’ll have babies all over the place!’

He started to squeeze Tinker around the neck as if to strangle her. Tinker gave a desperate yelp and bit him on the thumb. Pissy yelled ‘Eina!’ and dropped Tinker, who fell to the ground yelping and afraid. Pissy hopped up and down and wrung his hand in the air and then he brought his thumb up to his mouth to suck the hurt.

I didn’t even realise I’d done it until after Pissy had doubled up and began to cough, holding his stomach and coughing like mad and staggering all over the place. I’d driven my fist straight into his stomach, hard as anything. I can tell you I didn’t hang around to admire the result, but grabbed Tinker and ran back to the big rock and put her safely in her burrow.

I knew that wasn’t the end of the matter. Far from it, a person doesn’t get away with that sort of thing with Pissy Vermaak around. He’d be reporting to Mevrou and she’d tell Meneer Botha, that was for sure. This time you in the deep shit, man! I was about to lose the one thing I loved the most in the whole world. Without Tinker I was on my own again and my happy days were all over, finish and klaar. So I just sat there under the rock and I blubbed a bit and tried to think what I might do. But my brain was scrambled and no ideas would come and I was becoming desperate and the bell would soon go for us to wash our hands before going in to supper. I’d cleaned out Tinker’s burrow so it was a bit deeper in case someone came looking for her, and we had to clean our nails for inspection before we went in to supper. Mine were bad from the burrowing and I would have to take my place at the end of the queue in the shower room for my turn to use the scrubbing brush and if I didn’t get a go before the supper bell went I’d get the sjambok. Not that it mattered, dirty nails got three cuts and you’d only be sore sitting for about an hour before it wore off. Right now dirty nails were the least of my problems.

If Tinker and me ran away there wasn’t any place for us to go. I was deep inside enemy territory and a war was coming and Meneer Botha said he’d joined both the Broederbond and Die Ossewabrandwag, both sort of secret societies made up of Boere on Hitler’s side. He said the whole district felt the same and they were not going to fight for the blêrrie English, no matter what General Jan Christiaan Smuts said in all the newspapers and on the radio. Meneer Botha said that Jannie Smuts was a known traitor, a Boer War General who had gone over to the English in the First World War and became a hero to the British. So he was a definite traitor to the Boerevolk, to his very own herrenvolk.

‘Never you mind, we know about him, Jan Smuts now has the same blood on his hands as the British for the women and children who died in the concentration camps.’ That’s what Meneer Botha said. So you can see, running away with Tinker, especially with me being English, was a hopeless proposition. People wouldn’t lift a finger to help an English boy and his little bitch dog that was one day going to have babies that would need to be drowned in a sack.

At supper that night, which was the usual boiled potatoes and cabbage and stew that was gravy with only a very little bit of meat and lots of carrots and bits of tomato skin, I hardly managed to finish what was on my plate and I didn’t mind when someone took two of my potatoes and I didn’t even clean the plate with a piece of bread. I just didn’t have an appetite for life at that moment. I’d looked for Pissy but his table was at the other end of the dining room and I was too small to see him over all the heads that were in the way.

After we’d eaten, as usual the superintendent of the orphanage, Meneer Prinsloo, who was big and fat and wore braces and waved his hands about a lot, read from the Bible and said prayers and then told us stuff we needed to know which were called ‘daily instructions’, only they were meant for the next day. Then the other staff would say things if they needed to and last of all Mevrou, the matron, would stand up and read out who had to come and see her. This was usually the small kids who needed to be punished or boys who had to get medicine. She was only allowed to give the sjambok to the small kids under ten. After that you would get a proper whipping from Meneer Botha who, for the most part, was the punishment master. Sometimes, because he was once a district champion boxer, he’d make a boy put on the gloves and then he’d beat the shit out of him. ‘Fair and square,’ he’d always say. ‘If you can hit me you can get a bit of your own back.’ But even the biggest boys, who were sixteen, couldn’t get near him and they’d get in the ring with him and he’d really do some damage, black eyes and bloody noses and everything. Except for Fonnie du Preez who was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and schools’ lightweight champion as far as Louis Trichardt, Duiwelskrans, Tzaneen, Lydenburg and Pilgrims Rest. He was the one kid who could have easily landed a good few telling punches on anyone he liked including Meneer Botha. But it never happened, because Fonnie du Preez was Meneer Botha’s favourite. He’d taught him to box and the two of them were thick as thieves. People said they were like father and son. Meneer Botha said Fonnie was a natural who moved like lightning and had a knockout punch in both hands and would go far, maybe even to the schools’ boxing championships in Pretoria.

The funny thing was that Pissy Vermaak was protected by Fonnie du Preez. They were said to be related, they were second cousins or something like that. Although how this was possible was hard to see, they were a complete mismatch; one big and dark and built like a blue gum tree trunk and the other a real weed. They’d often be seen together, Pissy doing things for Fonnie like he was his servant.

Going into the ring with Meneer Botha was supposed to make a man out of you. But if there was a choice of the boxing ring or the sjambok you took the sjambok every time. This was because Meneer Botha was only allowed to give you six of the best and, while nobody said how hard he could hit you, it was still better than his invitation to meet him in the boxing ring. It wasn’t just about being knocked all over the place, it was that everyone was made to watch you being humiliated. Boere are a proud people and can’t stand to be humiliated. It’s not in their blood. With cuts from the cane you could always cover your arse with your trousers. An hour later everyone would forget about your beating, but with a hiding in the ring you’d walk around for days with a black eye, split lip and puffed-up and torn ears, maybe that’s what people thought kids like us who belonged to the Government ought to look like.

While I’m on the subject of punishment, Meneer Prinsloo, the superintendent, would also do punishment, but only if it was a really big crime called masturbation or for stealing or taking God’s name in vain. The other staff could pinch you, give you a clout on the back of the head, kick your arse or whack you over the knuckles with a steel-edged ruler, but they weren’t allowed to give you formal punishment where you had to remove your trousers and bend over and get six of the best.

So I waited for Mevrou to call my name. It wasn’t the sjambok I was afraid of. We all got beaten so often that you sort of got used to it and it wasn’t too bad. A sore bum is a sore bum and everyone in the showers had the welts of the cuts from the sjambok crisscrossing their bums like Chinese writing. It was Mevrou discovering about Tinker that worried me sick. She’d tell Meneer Botha who was in charge of things outside the hostel and that would be the end of my little dog. Like Mattress said, he’d call her a kaffir dog and wring her neck.

To my surprise my name wasn’t called out and nor was Pissy’s. This was strange because you always went for medicine after supper and Pissy would always have to go to get his cough mixture. But there you go, miracles will never cease, maybe he hadn’t said anything. Which was a big surprise because he could have blabbed easily enough because he had nothing to fear. There was no touching Pissy for fear of Fonnie du Preez. What’s more, Mevrou never gave him the sjambok because he was ‘too delicate of health’ and it was suggested that physical violence might bring on one of his out-of-the-blue fits. His coughing condition was bad enough as it was, so you see he had nothing to lose by being a telltale. You could hear him coughing at night in the little kids’ dormitory and people would shout at him to shurrup, but he couldn’t. He was the only person in the showers to have no marks on his pink bum. And the guys would say, ‘Pissy’s got a girl’s bum… Pissy’s got a girl’s bum.’ Maybe it wasn’t easy for him being sick and having out-of-the-blue fits and not being allowed to get the sjambok like everyone else.

And then all of a sudden I remembered about him getting a fit from physical violence, and I had punched him in the stomach. He’d staggered around coughing and I’d run away before seeing what happened. Maybe he’d had an out-of-the-blue fit. It was the first time I’d ever been brave and I might have given Pissy a fit or even killed him. I’d clean forgotten about him getting fits and, besides, I’d barely been aware of hitting him. I’d even quietly congratulated myself over the punch, which was the only good thing in the whole disaster and I intended bragging a bit to Mattress how I’d also got a strong heart like he said Tinker possessed.

Tinker, like I said before, wouldn’t put up with any nonsense from the piglets that were miles bigger than she was. She was the smallest by far but she wasn’t afraid and Mattress said it was because she was a lioness and had a strong heart.

‘Sometimes, Kleinbaas, you’ve just got to stand up for yourself even if you are the smallest,’ Mattress said. ‘The lioness doesn’t have to be told she’s brave, she just knows and so do all the other animals, even the big male lion who is supposed to be the boss of the jungle, they all know who is the real boss and who does the hunting. People can be the same, Kleinbaas. A strong heart isn’t about size.’

That night Pissy’s bed in the dormitory was empty. Nobody said anything about this because it wasn’t unusual for him to spend the night in the sick room when his chest was bad. All the other kids were pretty pleased by his absence because it meant we’d have a quiet night for a change. I was worried and didn’t think I’d be able to sleep but I was also very tired from the long day with all the worries I had accumulated and did fall asleep soon enough. Your eyes don’t always listen to your brain worrying. Mattress said that when things went wrong they’d seem better after a good night’s sleep. ‘In the morning the memory is washed clean,’ he said, that’s the closest I could get from the Zulu, which was, ‘In the morning the river has washed over the worry stones and the water is clean.’

The wake-up bell went at six o’clock and we had to hurry up and wash our faces, get dressed, make our beds and our towels had to be folded over the end bedrail. By six-thirty we would be standing at attention at the end of our bed for what was known by us boys as ‘half-jack inspection’. This was the daily dormitory inspection conducted by Mevrou who came round with her sjambok at the ready to inspect our beds and our folded towels and to punish the slightest untidiness. Even a button undone on your shirt could earn you a good whack.

I should explain about the word sjambok. A real sjambok is made of a single strip of rhino hide and is usually about four feet long and about an inch thick at the handle and gradually tapers down to about an eighth of an inch or less at the tip. While it is supple it isn’t like a whip and it only really bends on contact with the flesh. It is used by prison warders and the South African Police Force and by farmers to beat kaffirs. In the right hands it can kill, but it always delivers a severe blow and causes great welts and, if it’s correctly shaped and prepared, it will cut like a knife into flesh and even expose bone. It is much feared by the black people.

Now, Mevrou didn’t have one of those, a proper sjambok. What she had was a thick piece of leather about the length and thickness of a razor strop nailed onto a wooden handle. We called it a sjambok because that’s what we called anything that the staff beat you with. Her particular sjambok couldn’t kill you or anything, but it left a pretty broad mark on your bum, and it hurt like hell. Meneer Prinsloo and Meneer Botha used a long bamboo cane as their sjambok and you could tell who was who by the cuts on a person’s bum. All the little kids had broad marks from Mevrou’s sjambokEina