Frankie and Stankie (2 page)

Dinah's mum has the girls so close together because she doesn't always know best. She's been told that you don't get pregnant while you're breastfeeding and to her credit she's been breastfeeding Angel-face for fourteen months on demand, since she hasn't read Truby King, who has created a fashion for formulas and four-hourly regimentation. She does so even though Angel-face, who has a hearty appetite, frequently bites the nipple. In between feeds Angel-face even takes bites out of the bath soap, leaving behind little telltale semi-circles serrated by her teeth. Her favourite soap comes a dark, marbled green and it's called Cuticura. Angel-face finds it irresistible.

Dinah is kept in a cardboard box at first and wiped down with olive oil because she's too small to have proper baths. This is at a time when olive oil is still strictly medicinal. It's well before Elizabeth David has brought the good news from Aix-en-Provence to the British Isles, courtesy of Penguin Books, and then all over the Empire including Cape Town. Angel-face goes stiff with terror
when she first hears Tiny-mite's unearthly mewling cry, and she won't go near the cardboard box for days. For two years afterwards, she's even afraid to approach lifelike dolls. Unlike Angel-face, Tiny-mite is not a good eater. She drops off at the nipple and will not suck.

‘We had to smack you to make you eat,' her dad tells her in years to come.

He's always been a ready smacker. Her dad is called Ta, which is a corruption of Da, though Dinah's mum has diminutised this to Tächenherz because she comes from Berlin. His real name is Fred.

Dinah continues to be a non-eater throughout her childhood. When one of her dad's colleagues visits with a packet of biscuits, he says they're ‘for Lisa to eat and for Dinah to play with'. The biscuits are called Iced Zoological but the girls call them Animal Biscuits. Each biscuit is a scalloped rectangle with pastel icing on the top and an animal piped on to it in a contrasting colour. There are yellow giraffes on rose-pink icing and white tigers on sky-blue icing. Dinah loves to play with the biscuits. She's always been good at playing, while Angel-face isn't introspective enough to make up games. She likes visitors and outings and treats. Best of all she likes Toffo-lux. She hangs around saying, ‘I'm bored. I've got nothing to do. What can I do now? What's there to eat? What's for pudding?' So, right from the time they're about three and four, it's Tiny-mite who thinks up all the games.

Sometimes she leads Angel-face into the garden shed, where families of daddy-long-legs live on the walls. If she touches their fragile, umbrella-spoke legs with her index finger they scurry up the walls so deftly that it leaves her feeling heady. She already loves to climb walls and trees herself but she knows she'll never be able to climb like that on sheer vertical walls. For some reason Angel-face hates the creepy-crawlies, especially when they move. When Dinah makes them scurry up the walls she yells and screams in panic. This makes Dinah keep on doing it because, being so much smaller than her sister, it's one way to redress the balance.

Mealtimes are hell for Dinah, when she clamps her mouth shut against the approaching spoon.

‘This one's for Teddy,' her dad will say. ‘This one's for Panda. This one's the last one. This one's the very last one.'

She knows it will never be the last one until the bowl is empty.
Sometimes he eats a spoonful himself to encourage her, and because, like Angel-face, he has a hearty appetite. Then, once she's turned six, he always finishes up by saying, ‘This one's for Co.' Co is Dinah's rag-doll that she's had for her fifth birthday. Her name is really Ro. Ro is short for Rosema, which is not short for Rosemary. When grown-ups suggest it, Dinah says firmly, ‘No. Her name is Rosema. Just Rosema.'

Dinah only gets to know one real-life Rosemary, but this is only once she's started school. Rosemary is a girl in the neighbourhood who has high status in the child community because she's excessively blonde. Rosemary is white-mouse blonde with a small whiffly nose and little see-through ears. Lots of the children are blonde-ish but not so blonde that the light shines right through them as it does with Rosemary. This whiteness is associated with purity. Rosemary's dad is immensely rich, even though he can't read and write. He is said to sign papers with an X.

This is an achievement that Dinah's mum remarks upon, a little pointedly, from time to time, since the girls' dad is not at all rich even though he can read and write in eight languages, having been rigorously taught between the wars in one of those gymnasiums they have in Holland for clever boys and girls. His best thing, along with teaching himself to play musical instruments, is maths. For a while he works as an actuary in a bank but he finds it boring so he now works for a pittance as an untenured junior lecturer in the maths department at the university in Cape Town. The girls' mum calls his mathematical activities puzzling. She uses the word as if it was from the verb to puzzle.

‘Tächenherz is puzzling,' she says.

It's just one example from her range of Germanic verbal peculiarities.

The flat doesn't have a lot of space and if he's marking exam scripts at the only table then the girls' dad has to clear them away at mealtimes. Dinah's horror times. Sometimes, presumably to blot out the girls' chatter going on in the same room, he'll start to puzzle out loud. Angel-face and Dinah are amused by his mathematical gibberish and chant bits of it at each other.

‘Pi to the curve,' they say. They say it as they take turns to climb on to a big wooden box called the
Klappkasten
and jump off. ‘Pi to the curve.'

Dinah envisages triangles of gooseberry pie with crimped edges, because there are gooseberries growing in the garden of the flats.

They do the same sometimes when their dad sings his Italian songs to their mother's accompaniment. There's one about a beautiful mouth:
O bocca bella. O bocca, bocea bella
. For years the girls think it's about malted corn porridge because one of Lisa's many culinary favourites is a chocolatey porridge called Maltabela which she likes to alternate in the mornings with Aunt Jemima's Cream of Wheat. The song keeps repeating the phrase so they giggle and sing along in silly voices: ‘Oh Maltabela, oh Malta, Maltabela!'

They suffer a similar misunderstanding with an Italian worker song that makes reference to comrades who have died in the struggle. One of the comrades is called Carlo Franchi and, since the struggle has worn him out, there's a reference to the Italian word for being exhausted.
Stanchi
. It rhymes with Franchi. Dinah envisages it as a song about two clowns called Frankie and Stankie and she explains this to Lisa. She pictures them in orange bloomers and very small orange bowler hats. When Frankie is the right way up, then Stankie is upside-down and vice versa.

Aunt Jemima's Cream of Wheat has a medallion on the box with a smiling Southern black lady on it who wears her hair tied up in a red-and-white-spotted handkerchief with a knot at the front. Dinah likes this picture almost as much as that of the shiny black cat on the Black Cat peanut butter label. She also likes the label on the Camp Coffee bottle and wishes her mother would buy it when they go shopping, because the man in the turban is saying to the man in the kilt, ‘Ready, ay ready,' which sounds just like the repeating refrain of a poem. Ay is a poetry word for always.

The absence of money is a trial to Dinah's mother, whose family used to have lots of it, but now the money's all gone up in smoke – some of it literally, because the family houses in Berlin and Furstenwalde and Frankfurt-am-Main have been bombed to dust along with the businesses in which they had their investments – and the rest of it vanished when Dinah's mum's parents got cheated out of it as not very clued-up immigrants during their period of relocation to Cape Town before the war. It's hard for Dinah's mum to be always thinking about saving tuppence on
vegetables and biscuits, or to get her head around the idea that the world she grew up in isn't there any more. Not even the streets in Berlin are in the same place, even though they've still got the same names.

And she's often sad about her favourite aunt, Tante Ella, who is currently living like a pauper in one room of her own villa in East Berlin – or what had been her own villa until she was ‘invited' to make it over to the state and watch it turn into a doss-house. Tante Ella never married, having in her youth broken off her engagement to a Danish count whom she suspected of being after her money. She decided to spend her life as an independent single woman and she became Dinah's mum's favourite relation.

The aunt made herself responsible for her niece's coming-out and took her to the opera and on trips to Copenhagen on a boat called the
Schleswig Holstein
, where Dinah's mum sometimes won at deck quoits. She still has a china sailor doll with a hat that says
Schleswig Holstein
in gold Gothic script on the hatband. And she still has one of the winning rope deck quoits. She keeps these in her knicker drawer and she sometimes lets the girls play with them. Dinah who loves poking about finds that her mum periodically hoards dark Swiss chocolate and Nescafé and Lux Flakes in her drawers along with little bottles of 4711 cologne. She does this whenever there's a whiff of further trouble in the world. Korea, Suez, Cyprus. This is from having lived through the First World War in Germany. Swiss chocolate, Nescafé, soap flakes and cologne are this life's greatest necessities. That's if you're German.

Dinah's mum has lots of stories about her childhood, unlike her dad who only has five. At the drop of a hat she will tell stories about skiing holidays in the Harz Mountains and about her two boy cousins, the skiing champs, whose mum was Tante Berthe and whose dad was a judge. She'll tell about her cousin Gunther's wedding where the bride was a White Russian ballet dancer on the run from the Bolsheviks who had a tantrum at her own wedding reception. A grown-up woman in red lace, kicking and screaming with her legs in the air. She'll tell about the seafaring trips she took with her father and her three brothers on the family's motor launch called
Sophie
.

Sophie is Dinah's maternal grandmother's name, but she never went along on the boat that was named after her, because she
didn't have sea legs. She had no head for heights either, because when she was chosen, as the auburn-haired beauty of Wiesbaden, to represent the new century on New Year's Day in 1900, she fainted while waving regally from a specially constructed obelisk and her huge feathered hat wafted slowly downwards into the square from a great height, like a winged angel. In all the photographs, she's shown to have a fine hourglass figure and a thick mass of wavy hair. She doesn't look at all like Dinah's mum who is tall and thin with high cheekbones and widely spaced blue eyes and fine baby-blonde hair.

Dinah's mum looks just like her father who comes from the Friesian Islands, but got sent to school in Berlin where the boys called him Bahne Banana, because his name is Jacob Bahne Jacobsen. The two things that Dinah's mum tells the girls about her visits to the island are that, when you posted a letter, you didn't need to buy a stamp, because you just posted your money into the box along with the letter and the postie knew it was your money. She also tells that, when you went to church, there was a plaque that said all the families on the island, except for the Jacobsens and one other family, had been wiped out in a flood in the sixteenth century. This was useful for the Jacobsens when it came to proving their grade A Aryan blood when the Nazis came to power. Dinah's mum looks like a star candidate for the Hitler Jugend, except that she's always hated uniforms.

The girls' mum tells stories about the orphaned baby owl that her brother Otto reared in the stables at Lindenstrasse
vierundachtzig
by feeding it pieces of raw meat on the end of a stick. She tells stories about the family dog, who was called Deena, but spelt just like Dinah without the ‘h'. She tells about how Dina had been taught not to kill the chickens but couldn't resist taking them in her mouth and giving each one a little squeeze, so the chickens in the garden at Lindenstrasse vierundachtzig all walked with a limp. She tells about how her dad had bought the rambling old Lindenstrasse house from the estate of a reclusive army colonel who'd lived out his decline surrounded by dogs and cats; and how the overgrown garden of the house was a mass of animal gravestones as far as you could see.

‘Dogs to ze right, cats to ze left,' Dinah's mum tells the girls.

She has stories about the Tiergarten and the Berlin Opera House
where the boat carrying off the Wagnerian lovers got derailed on stage on account of the singers' immoderate combined weight.

Once the war is over, occasional letters get through from the Eastern Zone in which Tante Ella, old and sick, pleads for parcels of smoked bacon. Dinah's mum sends these wrapped in linen sewn up with a darning needle, though she doubts whether they ever arrive. Dinah watches her write the address in marking ink with a tiny dipping pen that she longs to have for her dolls to use at their pretend school. Dinah has lots of dolls, the favourites of which, other than Rosema and the baby dolls, are Deborah, Naomi and Jennifer. Rosema is closest to her heart, even though she has the look of a candidate for facial surgery and Dinah has replaced her original hair, which went matted and couldn't be brushed, with some unsightly black knitting wool. She's sewed this on with backstitch along the line of Rosema's centre parting so that, if she turns Rosema upside-down, the doll looks like a Mohican doing a head-stand. At first Dinah despises Rosema because she is a rag-doll and proper dolls are made of china or celluloid or Bakelite, and they can open and shut their eyes, click-clack. So for a year Rosema always dies when Dinah and Lisa play hospitals. They pick her up by one of her lanky limbs and hurl her into the corner.