Frankie and Stankie (28 page)

Many of Lorna Hill's ballet types are foreigners, so they do humorous foreign speak with long ‘e's and lots of ‘z's, while the kindly working classes all drop their ‘h's and say ‘Lawks-a-mercy'. Not one of the books quite throws at Dinah, as
Pride and Prejudice
does, how dialogue can lift and dance on points, how sentences can shine and crackle with a concentrated energy and a sharp crystal intelligence. So listening to Miss Barnes read it is like falling in love. It's like walking on air. It fills Dinah's mind with a new kind of music. Language is all the music she's never learned to play. Language is all the ballet steps she's never learned to dance. And maybe what she loves best of all is the book's disregard for any ‘description'. ‘Description' isn't there. It's expendable. It's burned away. All that's left is dexterity and concentration.
Pride and Prejudice
is real life, but all transfigured, and dancing in a box.

At the end of that year, Miss Barnes leaves to get married and her photograph is on the social page of the Durban
Daily News
. She's in white lace, standing next to a tall man with a moustache and Brylcreemed hair. She looks really pretty and smiley, even though the photographs make most of the brides look dumpy and weird. They have triangles of harsh Durban sunlight distorting their smiles and sometimes they look extra silly, with rows of bridesmaids who are grown-up women all wearing identical little girls' party
dresses made out of matching pastel taffeta. Plus the grooms often look like warthogs in scratchy hired suits.

In December, each of the first-year girls has to bring along her parents and have a meeting with Miss Maidment in her office. This is to decide on her subject choices for Matric. Miss Maidment spends the whole interview ignoring Dinah and her mum. She's focused exclusively on Dinah's dad and she's talking about Dinah in the third person, so it's all ‘she' and ‘her'. She's shaking her head over Dinah's long list of ‘could-do-better' and ‘disappointing' subject reports, because the days of Dinah's A1 ice-cream-row achievements are now well behind her. They have been ever since the moment that she and Angela teamed up to make school into their favourite social club. So nowadays Dinah is either giggling or daydreaming, or she's reading the wrong sort of book under the desk. Moreover, she's completely incapable of ever focusing on homework. She's resolved this by never doing any, so there's never any work for her to hand in.

In this transformation from Al rosette girl to dreamy slouch, no one, including Dinah, has taken into account the fact of her altered body chemistry. With adolescence, Dinah has suddenly shed her asthma. It's been replaced by chronic, violent hay fever for which she's kept on round-the-clock maintenance doses of timed-release antihistamines. Big capsules full of hundreds-and-thousands to be taken always at bedtime and then supplemented as necessary by instant-effect alternatives. And while asthma drugs will shock you awake, will keep you buzzing and have your heart racing with palpitations, hay-fever drugs will turn you into Lewis Carroll's dormouse. They have the effect of putting you to sleep. Then Miss Maidment passes judgement.

‘I suggest that Dinah takes the domestic science route,' she says.

Dinah's response is to feel a sudden, stabbing shock. She knows she'd rather die than spend her life in Miss Broughton's gigantic kitchen with all the pots and pans. Plus the needlework room is even worse. She's all too aware that Miss Maidment isn't making a positive statement about the quality of her apple turnovers or the finesse of her slip-stitch hems. What Miss Maidment is saying is that Dinah isn't academic. She's committing Dinah to the domestic science graveyard. And then, just as the graveyard is yawning, Dinah witnesses a miracle. She hears that her dad is paying her the only compliment of his life.

‘Granted she's a pain in the neck,' he's saying, ‘but she's strong on abstract reasoning. I think you're making a mistake.'

Angela's parents, on the other hand, are thoroughly deferential and they're happy with Miss Maidment's advice. The girls get together and talk about their meetings the moment they're released into the hall for orange squash and custard creams.

‘But I want to do domestic science,' Angela says.

Dinah merely stares at her friend as though she's somehow desecrating the memory of that tin caddy of stinking fish in white sauce – as if she were betraying the genius of all those bouncing cabbages with hearts. True, Angela has always turned out super-light shortcrust pastry and her buttonhole stitch is past compare. She's even recently turned the heels on a pair of lacy white socks. What neither of them will dare to mention is that they'll never again share a classroom, never again sit side by side in a double desk at the back. It's something that Dinah is thinking about all the way home.

She's still thinking about Angela when her mum notices Punch who is lying curled up in the gutter about twenty yards from the house. His wiry black broken coat is ever more streaked with grey, but now it's unusually matt in texture. He looks as if he's asleep, except that he isn't doing his usual sleepy-dog breathing and, when Dinah touches him, she can feel that he's gone stiff. Punch hasn't been run over. He's just died of old age. He wasn't all that young when he came, though he's always been young at heart. Time Lost Is Never Regained. Punch is dead and he'll never come back. Dinah and Lisa spend the evening in tears – and all the more so, because Punch, lovely Punch, has tried so hard to do his dying nicely, by crawling away from the house.

Big school proper means a reshuffle of existing first-year forms so that Dinah's is made up of lots of girls taking French and those few, like Dinah, who are taking fine art with art history. Miss Byrd is always picky about which girls she'll have in her class, but she's agreed to have Dinah after giving her a stern pep-talk. Pep-talks turn out to be quite out of character for Miss Byrd, who materialises as one of those rare and wonderful teachers who never needs to raise her voice. She treats her pupils as if they were adults and the girls simply rise to meet her expectations.

Lots of the girls in Dinah's form are new entrants from other schools. There are the two new Cornelias from Holland who quickly become each other's best friend and are known as Corrie and Cornie. There's dainty blonde Lynn with close-together eyes and immaculate levitating handwriting. Not only is Lynn's handwriting of such improbable and microscopic regularity that it looks as if it comes off one of those typewriters that prints cursive, but it proceeds along an imaginary line exactly two millimetres above all the lines upon which normal people write.

There's jaunty Adele with chestnut hair and matching freckles who thinks it's a big laugh that her dad was going to call her Adolf, after Hitler, but then she was born a girl. There's grating, impossible Bernice, who does ballet out of school and carries all her school stuff in a vanity case. Bernice always stands with her feet at ten to two and she's fixed the winsome expression on her face so that it looks permanently like that of a calendar pin-up. Bernice is drenched in protective affectations which are always counterproductive. She's afflicted with an unerring instinct to make her classmates loathe her.

‘I'm not
bragging
or anything,' she'll say, while making Bambi eyes into the mirror on the inside lid of the vanity case, ‘but don't you think I look just a
little
bit like Audrey Hepburn?'

There's something about Bernice's body language that's begging people to abuse her. Something Blanche Dubois. And on parents' day Bernice is performing a sort of grown-up buddy-buddy act, arm in arm with her dad who's got an Austrian accent and silver maestro hair. None of the girls ever gets to clap eyes on Bernice's mother.

Boy-mad Beattie Blain is a girl oozing street-cred whose challenging blue eyes make all the teachers take one look at her and think trouble. They all make Beattie sit at the front of the class but sometimes this can misfire. Miss Cornbury has cartoon-book spinster's features and a lingering sibilant S. So Beattie reacts promptly to the S, not only by maintaining a sort of Grandmother's Footsteps of almost undetectable snake-like hissing which stops the moment Miss Cornbury pauses in her speech, but also by spreading it about as fact that Miss Cornbury showers the front-row girls with spittle. Beattie brings packs of paper-cocktail umbrellas to school which she holds up over her face whenever Miss Cornbury starts to speak,
so that very soon she's established a ritual to cause general delight. One glimpse of Beattie's little umbrellas waiting in readiness on the desk top and the class is tittering and nudging. Though Miss Cornbury never makes the connection, she knows that the class is behaving badly and she embarks on a strategy. She brings in ready-to-use handwritten notes which she holds up at the start of every lesson. On the notes, the names of prospective offenders have been omitted, but she announces her intention of filling them in, should the need arise:

—— has been a constant nuisance throughout the arithmetic lesson…

‘One peep out of
you
,' Miss Cornbury says. ‘One peep out of
any
of you, and you will take this – thisss – note straight – ssstraight – to Miss – Misss – Maidment. Under-ssss-tood?'

Beattie has a supply of tiny plastic clothes-pegs that come in a range of colours. She wears one or other of these clipped to her blazer lapel to show what stage she's at with whoever is her current boyfriend. Dinah can't remember the details of the colour coding, except that a green peg means French kissing and a red peg means going steady. Most of the girls don't have boyfriends yet, but Beattie is never without.

Bet Ramsgate's got a sweet smiley moon face and faint traces of her parents' strong Yorkshire speak which, to Dinah and her classmates, counts as exotic. It's the kind of accent they've only ever heard done badly during occasional recitations of ‘Yoong Albert'. Bet's dad has brought a whiff of Yorkshire to the shores of the Indian Ocean by fitting out the family home with new-style, wall-to-wall patterned carpeting. So when Bet takes her friends home to practise rock ‘n' roll in her bedroom, Mr Ramsgate will roar up the stairs and utter a line so blissful to the girls' ears, so perfect in its delivery, that they'll return again and again in the hope of provoking a repetition.

‘An WOT'S alt'thoomp – thoomp – THOOMPIN' on't'OON-DRED an – twent – eh – pound CARpet?!' he bawls, promptly causing the rocking 'n' rolling girls a spasm of giggles so intense that they almost choke in ecstasy.

Rock ‘n' roll is the big thing, so, while Elvis records are being
ceremonially burned in the Afrikaner heartlands and parents everywhere are thanking God for the squeaky-clean option of Pat Boone, apartheid is keeping Dinah and her classmates from the sound sensation on their doorstep. Miriam Makeba and The Skylarks, Kippie Moeletsi, Hugh Masakela and The Manhattan Brothers are performing at black weddings in Sophiatown. They're playing in black cinemas and in illegal black shebeens. So when Sophiatown gets bulldozed, it's one of the first urban ‘black spots' to go – because although unscrambling the Cape's racial mix is giving the government its biggest headache, Sophiatown is really getting to them. For one, it's right there in Johannesburg and its residents have freehold title. Black families bought the land, way back, off a speculator. He'd wanted whites to buy it, but then came the sewage works bang next door, so he sold it to blacks instead.

Now the government hates everything Sophiatown stands for. It's multi-ethnic and densely populated. It's very urban and very wised-up. Every freehold backyard has sheds full of illegal tenants. It's full of artists, journalists, musicians, bohemians, shebeen queens, gangsters and protection racketeers. It's got Father Trevor Huddleston fighting hard for its survival: Father Huddleston, the Anglican priest whose high school is where generations of bright black kids have learned how to feel as good as anybody. It's Father Huddleston who has arranged for Hugh Masakela to get his first trumpet, a trumpet from Louis Armstrong.

So it doesn't matter now if you're part of a great swing band when the big trucks come for you. What matters is, are you a ‘Bantu' or a Coloured, or an Indian, or sometimes even a Jew? This is what will decide where you go when you get removed – on that day when you wake to hear the verandah posts that your grandfather built being smashed up by police sledge hammers. If you're lucky you get time to grab your baby's laundry and bundle your pots on to the back of the revving truck. If you're lucky, you'll have rights to stay in the urban area under the terms of Section 10 of the Black Urban Areas Act. If so, then you'll get removed to Meadow-lands – that core of what is Soweto-to-be – Meadowlands, which is waiting for you bleakly in the gleam of the cold dawn. If not, then your number's up. Suddenly, all over the country, Pass Raids are being stepped up.

For blacks they've become the nightly terror. Because if your
pass shows you don't qualify under Section 10 to live and seek work in the urban area, then you're out. A husband might qualify, a wife not. So you go one way, she goes another. Back to the native reserve which hasn't quite yet been re-named the Homeland. You're lucky if you're Coloured, because you may not have the vote any more, but you have rights of residence in the urban area. Blacks are another kettle of fish. This is because the black man in his natural state is not meant to be a city animal. The Secretary of State for Native Affairs has declared him ‘innocent and trustworthy'. But that's in his natural habitat. The Bantu must at all costs be protected from the corrupting effects of exposure to ‘city tricks'.

Meanwhile Dinah has joined the all-white beginners' class at the Dudley Andrews School of Ballroom Dancing where, uniformly togged up in stiff petticoats and gingham circular skirts with wide elastic belts, hair in swingy blonde ponytails, the class is learning to jive, quickstep, waltz and rumba. Girls sit along one side of the room, boys along the other. And then, whenever one of the unfavoured boys starts to cross the room towards you, there'll be a shameful shrieky stampede of girls all heading for the Ladies. Mrs Dudley Andrews issues periodic stern lectures on the etiquette of the ballroom. If a boy asks a girl to dance, then it's rude not to say yes. For Dinah this is somehow analogous with the etiquette of the marriage proposal. If a boy asks you to marry him, then it's rude not to say yes.