Frankie and Stankie (14 page)

Port Natal is the only Afrikaans-language school in Durban and all the boys, even the sixth formers, get made to wear shorts as part of the uniform. They have to wear the shorts with blazers, shirts and ties – and with black lace-up shoes and socks. This makes them look exactly like grown-up men who've forgotten to put their trousers on – especially as, at this time in South Africa, shorts always come so short that they're never any longer than your knickers. Both English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites are agreed that long shorts are a badge of sissies. They are associated with pithhelmeted, skinny-legged joke-Englishmen – the sort that end up in those cartoon stew pots beloved of cartoon savages. Even though they are passionately loyal to the mother country, white Durbanites know that they are more vigorous and manly than the
English-
English back in England. Everyone in Durban has heard that the
English
-English wear tennis shoes into the sea which is a clear indication of sissiness, especially as nobody in South Africa has experienced pebble beaches. On Durban beaches the only thing that hurts your feet is the baking temperature of the sand. The obvious rightness of shorter-than-short shorts is only challenged, four decades on, by the encroaching dominance of Australian beach-boy culture with its attendant floral Bermudas.

Nobody in Dinah's school will sit next to the Port Natal boys on the bus going home, because those brawny naked thighs spreading out on the seats make them feel much too squeamish. Sometimes Dinah speculates that all this muscle-bound, sun-blasted pinko-white flesh must be utterly repellent to blacks, because blacks, when they aren't in their workman's overalls and kitchen-boy suits, wear snazzy, Chicago-gangster get-ups: zoot suits and rakishly
angled felt hats and perforated two-tone shoes. This is in stark contrast to the style of local white English-speaking males who generally dress like Jehovah's Witnesses. Most have bought into the post-war Sta-prest trouser look, which comes complete with Y-front pantie-line and sleeveless Airtex vest. Perma-crease synthetic ‘slax' are worn with a short-sleeved nylon shirt – the latter always rigorously tucked in and belted, because a hanging-out shirt is considered slovenly and it's too much associated with kitchen-boy suits. These, by contrast, are made of undyed calico and consist of baggy long shorts worn with a loose overhanging short-sleeved top and no underpants. The suits have red braid on the shirt and trouser hems and are usually worn with bare feet.

The flash off-duty clothes that blacks wear can be bought on tick in the Indian-owned emporiums like Moosa's at the upper end of downtown Durban where the legless beggars hang out. That's the end furthest from the beachfront, so to get to the white department stores, or to the beach, you have to pass through this commercial area, where Indians ply their trade from pretty, rickety old buildings with New Orleans-style balconies and shady covered walks. The walkways have baskets full of brass bangles and cheap sandals and bales of sari cloth that spill out on to the pavements. Then there's also the Indian Market which has covered stalls bursting with flowers and aubergines and pawpaws and spices. It has drapery stalls and the odd Zulu
sangoma
selling potions of medicinal monkey gland and ground-up rhino horn. The Indian market is where the girls' mum always goes when she wants to buy cut flowers.

The reason Lisa and Dinah like to go shopping with their mum is not only because she doesn't speak Afrikaans to them in West Street or buy them Knockabouts. It's because she doesn't make them hurry past those displays in toy departments where people are demonstrating wind-up dogs and dolls that can say
‘Mamma
' in little kitten voices. It's because she takes them in and out of all sorts of shops where they buy Horrocks print fabrics and gingham for Mrs van der Walt to make into dresses, and rick-rack braid and cards of press studs, and novelty buttons for little girls' cardis with teddybears and ladybirds on them, and ribbons for Dinah's hair, and Coty face powder for herself from the
parfumerie
in Payne Brothers department store. And one day she lets Dinah have her
photograph taken bottle-feeding a baby lion cub in Greenacre's during a game-park promotion week.

Sometimes she goes into the Anglo-Swiss Bakery to buy Viennese Whirls; and sometimes they go upstairs to the Maypole Tearoom opposite the Cenotaph that has two yellow-and-blue ceramic angels dragging a yellow-and-blue dead soldier up the side of a yellow-and-blue stone slab. Along the bottom it says, ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them,' and behind it, surrounded by palms and spiky aloes, is a puff-eyed bronze Queen Victoria with mynah birds squabbling on her head. There's an especially delicious cake you can get at the Maypole Tearoom that has six thin layers of biscuit stuck together with green icing. And each layer of icing is sprinkled with desiccated coconut and crushed nuts. Because the Maypole Tearoom is upstairs you can also look straight out on to the top of the Cenotaph with your eyes on a level with its yellow ceramic sunrays.

Sometimes their mother's friend, Frau Architekt Liesl Mainz, is in the tearoom and – because she's a woman of position, with a bigger house than Dinah's parents and a husband in the business community – she's often in there playing host to visiting Austrian musicians and other Teutonic ethnics who have come by bearing culture. So one day she'll be in there dispensing cakes to the Vienna Boys' Choir in their sailor suits and, another time, she'll have a whole troupe of Tyrolean yodellers. The yodellers are all wearing little hats with feathers and so is Liesl Mainz. Dinah prays that she won't notice them because the yodellers are so embarrassing and one of them is even pausing to have a little yodel over the cakes.

Liesl Mainz has a son called Peter who is Dinah's age, but his mother has declared him a prodigy which, by implication, puts him out of Dinah's league, though she and Lisa get asked to Peter's birthday parties. Even at his own parties, Peter is always encouraged to play his violin for the visitors and he also plays the piano. For a while Dinah can do little duets with him because her mother is sending her to a piano teacher, but she never practises except for in the frantic half-hour before the weekly lesson, so she soon falls behind and begs to stop. What's especially embarrassing about the piano lessons is that sometimes the teacher gets her star pupil to take Dinah's lesson instead and the star pupil is a boy. He's a
Durban Boys' High School pupil called Bobby Mills, who wears his uniform for the lessons.

Then, on New Year's Eve, when Dinah's family have gone to the Mainz's house for dinner, Lisa and Dinah decide they want to sleep over, so Mrs Mainz makes up two beds for them while Mr Mainz drives Dinah's parents home. This is necessary because they don't yet have their own car and it's ages before they get one. As soon as they're tucked up in bed on their own in the dark, Lisa starts saying she's scared.

‘Let's go and say you've got asthma,' she says. ‘Then they'll have to drive us home.'

Dinah isn't scared but she's much too drowsy not to go along with the plan, so Lisa tiptoes into the Mainz's bedroom at one o'clock in the morning and wakes them up.

‘We've got to go home because Dinah's got asthma,' she says.

Mrs Mainz is wearing a copious nightie and Mr Mainz is as grumpy as anything because he's been pulled out of his sleep to drive them home. All the way, he's in a filthy temper and he's getting more and more sarcastic. Mrs Mainz has a face that's all twisted to one side because she's had to have half her jawbone removed on account of a tumour in the bone. She tells the girls' mum that she was going to have plastic surgery but, when he was four, Peter told her not to because he loved her just the way she was. And Peter's word holds great sway with his mother.

The classy shops in West Street are Payne Brothers, Greenacre's, John Orr's and Stuttaford's, but there are also the Hub and the Bon Marché, which are much more penny-bazaar and they never get air-conditioning. They have old-fashioned bentwood chairs and walls of cupboards with a multitude of little wooden drawers, and counters with brass yardsticks fitted to their edges with the inches and half-inches marked out. And they still have those pneumatic overhead brass tubes into which the shop assistants have to put the customers' money along with a handwritten invoice called a docket.

The shop assistant puts these into an oval capsule that twists shut in the middle and she sends the capsule whizzing along inside the brass tube. It makes a whoosh like pumping up bicycle tyres and you can see it winding along all round the shop ceiling until it reaches the cashier who sits in a cubicle high up near the roof. The
cashier counts out the change and sends it whizzing back to the shop assistant who untwists the capsule and gives the customer her change. The whizzing brass tubes are really exciting, because they connect you with someone who ought to be unreachable. Lisa and Dinah have never used a telephone and don't have one at home, but the tubes give them the same tingly feeling that they get when they speak into those home-made telephones they make from
The Wonder Book of Things to Do
, with two tin cans joined with a long piece of string.

All the
Wonder
books have been handed on to them in a batch by their dad's professor who is a mild Jewish elderly called Prof Stein. They never learn his first name, but his wife always calls him Daddy, even though their children are all grown up. One is a doctor and one is a journalist who edits
Drum
magazine. If ever Prof Stein tries to sneak out of his house in his comfy shoes, then his wife pounces on him.

‘
Daddy?
' she says. ‘You don't think you're going out like
that
, do you? Go and change into your decent shoes at once!'

Prof Stein just pretends he's been absent-minded and he shuffles back into the bedroom to change, looking meek and sheepish.

Then his wife will say to Lisa and Dinah, just as if they were the grown-ups, ‘He always tries to get away with it, you know.'

Prof Stein is very absent-minded and he once gave a lift to a hitch-hiker, but along the way he forgot that the car was his, so when he got to where he was going, he stopped and got out and thanked the hitch-hiker for the ride. Then he walked off, leaving the hitch-hiker with his car. Maths people are supposed to be absent-minded, but the girls' dad never is.

His colleague, René van den Borcht from Belgium, is, because one day when his wife Griet has gone back to Antwerp to visit her parents, he has to excuse himself from a lecture because he's suddenly remembered that he's left the electric kettle on for a cup of coffee. He dashes home, but when he gets there he's relieved to find that he must not have got round to switching it on after all. Then, having dashed home in the Durban heat, he decides that he really does need that cup of coffee before he can go back, so this time he switches on the kettle and sits down to wait for it to boil. He waits and waits until there's a really nasty smell and then he finds that the kettle is burnt out, because he's forgotten to put in any water.

The main thing Dinah remembers about René van den Borcht is that he has an obscene party song that involves rotating a beer glass three times round his crotch. The girls know about the obscene party song because once, when their parents are having a party, and they're supposed to be in bed, they're both too excited to go to sleep because their favourite person, Peter Bullen, has brought his younger brother along and his brother is called Paul. This revelation means the girls can't help but keep darting down the passage in their pyjamas to chant ‘Two Little Dicky Birds' with bits of paper stuck to their finger ends:

Two little dicky birds
Sitting on a wall
One named Peter
One named Paul –

Their parents keep trying to shush them but they're too wound up to pay any attention, so they continue with their birdie theme by taking turns to run down the passage and shout ‘Cuckoo!' and then run back again in fits of giggles. Finally their mum just lets them come in and run their fingers round all the cut-glass bowls with the remains of the Charlotte Russe and the Apple Snow that she's made for her buffet supper. That's when someone starts banging on her piano and René van den Borcht is singing along in Flemish whilst doing all that rude stuff around his crotch with a beer glass in his hand.

Saying ‘the Hub' out loud is never a problem, but knowing how to say ‘the Bon Marché' is always a headache. For all the girls at school it's simple. It's just called ‘the Bonn March', as in the month that comes after February. Dinah knows this isn't right and she feels too silly to say it. But she can't pronounce it French-wise either, because that would sound even worse. So she tries not to say the shop's name at all, but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem, because Lisa and Dinah's mum is much too foreign to understand these things, so she always shames the girls in front of their schoolfriends by saying ‘Bon Marché' all French-wise, without even noticing that it's making everyone snigger.

One of Lisa's best schoolfriends is a girl called Elizabeth Lazarus whose mum is German as well, except that Mrs Lazarus is Jewish.
The whole Lazarus family is proper Jewish. Mrs Lazarus always insists to Lisa that the girls' mum is Jewish as well, even though Lisa tries to make her understand that this is not the case. Lisa explains to Mrs Lazarus that their dad is sort of half Jewish, but their mother isn't Jewish at all and that, because of this, she and Dinah each have one Jewish earlobe. This is what their dad has once told them, but Mrs Lazarus is unshakeable.

‘No, dear,' she says. ‘Your mother is Jewish.'

This is a bit of a puzzle for Lisa because she doesn't realise that Elizabeth's mother has to believe Lisa's mum is Jewish, because she thinks that she's a nice lady and there's no such thing as a nice German. If you come from Germany, then you have to be a Nazi or a Jew. That's all there is to it.