Frankie and Stankie (24 page)

Most of the Indians are still dirt poor, though some, against the odds, have managed to become small market gardeners, or door-to-door vegetable traders with one second-hand van. Some have got their sons and daughters through high school and a few families can even boast a doctor or a lawyer on board. Then there are the other Indians, the free Muslims from Gujarat, who have come with a little money and established themselves as more significant traders and also as shack landlords in the black townships where they, too,
are obliged, by law, to live. These are the Indians that both blacks and whites hate most. Squeezed into the Shylock role by racist laws and vicious licensing acts, property-owning Indians are always under threat and are often on the squeeze themselves. Then, in the months following the assault and trauma of the 1948 election, Natal's more impoverished, underdog Zulus turn, not on whites, but on Indians, who are more visibly in the line of fire. There's wholesale burning of Indian property and brutal mob attacks that end in a hundred and forty dead. And a mob is not disposed to discriminate between rich Muslims and poor Hindus. Any Indians will do.

Dinah's mum is at the Grey Street Indian Market when the anti-Indian riots break out. She's buying flowers for a neighbour who's in the maternity hospital. Then suddenly she's in the middle of a roaring crowd and she hears herself being yelled at.

‘Hey, crazy lady, come out of there!' the policeman shouts, but the mob simply parts around her. She and her flowers are untouched.

Given the high-speed growth rate of any plant in Durban, Dinah's mum's garden soon becomes a thing of wonder. The bald terraces of red mud are covered with coarse, un-English grass through which black millipedes crawl. There are avocado trees and pawpaw trees and a tree out front with a nobbly trunk and pendant red flowers, like fuchsias. Passion-fruit vines gallop along the verandah and along the mud wall of the side passage to the kitchen door. There are cobbles around the base of the avocado tree and there's a little bench in its shade. Some of her trees become protected species, which means that, for ever after, they must be left to loom picturesquely over the little house, threatening the eaves and the guttering.

Dinah's parents don't fence their garden. And, since theirs is the only unfenced house, their sideway path becomes a corridor for the black pedestrians of Cato Manor, which enrages the woman next door. Dinah's parents deliberately don't fence the garden, partly because they like the open aspect, but also because they're aware that, with the relentless extension of white suburbia, miles of fencing makes rings of steel around what were yesterday's public rights of way, and this means black pedestrians, often with heavy loads, are required sometimes to walk mile-long detours, just in
order to get back home. And it's not only the black pedestrians, because these days, there's Evalina, who's become a fixture in the bungalow's native
kia
.

All houses in Durban are built with a routine hutch for a black domestic at the bottom of the garden. The hutch is something that Dinah's dad has no choice about. It comes along as part of the package with plans A, B and C. And the family hasn't been in residence five minutes before Charley, the Vice-Chancellor's swashbuckling, densely black Moçambiquan chauffeur, has twisted Ta's arm to ensconce his new girlfriend in the hutch as domestic servant. That way Evalina will be conveniently accessible to him.

Evalina is fabulous and she's great to have in the house. A big woman with a big personality, Evalina explodes with charm. She bangs about with duster and broom, listening each morning to the catchy sound of 1950s Radio Bantu, the SABC's ghetto radio station which is right then pouring out the cream of the townships' Golden Age black music. She has enormous boobs and a huge throaty laugh and all the phone calls that come to the house are for her. This means that, when Evalina is having her afternoon break, Dinah's parents are her constant messengers. They're forever running down to the edge of the lawn and calling down to the hutch. ‘Telephone, Evalina!' Then Evalina, her headscarf awry and her person divested of its undergarments, will come chortling and bouncing up the garden path, clutching at her unbuttoned overall.

‘
Hau
, master – no bodice,' she'll say and she'll sometimes have a super-quick flash to prove her point about this.

There's lots of partying and visitors in the hutch, which causes the neighbour almost to fall into an apoplexy – more especially so because she's somehow found out that Dinah's dad is paying wages over the odds. This is considered a caddish practice and is commonly referred to as ‘spoiling the native girl'.

‘I never know who's coming or going,' she says.

Because most white South African householders observe a strictly-no-visitors rule, the neighbour thinks it's outrageous that Evalina should be allowed visitors. Yet Dinah's house is the only one in the street that absolutely never gets burgled. And, mercifully, by the time Evalina is finally unmasked as the long-term
receiver of stolen goods for a thriving burglary syndicate it's decades later, and the neighbour has been long under the sod.

Dinah's mother is pleased with her garden, but she's still quite exercised about the little strip of muddy verge that constitutes the pavement beyond her unfenced garden and she decides to distance herself from the mud by marking her property's boundary with a row of aloes in large tubs. Francis gets the tubs for her. Cheap, madam. Very cheap. So twelve handsome metal tubs appear, which the two of them paint a nice dark-green. The tubs are a source of pleasure to her, until Ta one day watches a small troop of skinny Indian schoolkids pointing and giggling at the tubs. Very soon they are marching up and down, arms swinging, and chanting as they cross and re-cross the garden. Dinah's dad cocks an ear and listens to the drift of their chant. They are keeping in step and singing lustily.

One, two, three, four,
Five, six, seven, eight,
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve –
TWELVE green shit buckets
Outside of a YELL-ow house!

While the white areas of Durban all have water-borne sewage, the black locations don't, so Dinah's mum's plant tubs, so stylish to her white neighbours, are of course instantly recognisable to a troop of Indian schoolkids. And the revelation that his wife's plant tubs are knock-off from the location sewage works is vastly amusing to Dinah's dad, but her mum is mortified and insists that the buckets must go.

Now she's back to the undemarcated muddy verge and she doesn't have the money to have it paved. Plus it belongs to the council, doesn't it?

‘Write to the council for me, Dee,' she says one day. ‘Tell them to do something about it.'

‘Me?' Dinah says. ‘They won't do anything.'

‘They will if you say that your father's a professor,' she says.

Dinah laughs at her, because she knows that her mum is daft, old-fashioned daft, foreign daft – that her pre-war German hierarchical
Weltanschauung
will be a matter for derision. She knows that her mum's a bit taken with the fact that Ta has recently been made Professor of Maths, and that she probably really
does
think a strip of mud outside his garden is no longer in keeping with his status.

‘Only think,' Dinah's mum says. ‘His colleagues and his visitors having to walk always through all this mud.'

So Dinah writes what she considers to be a completely spoofy, hammed-up letter. She paints a vivid picture of the great man's distinguished guests – a line of Professor Brainstorms in gowns and mortar boards – all ruining their shoes on rainy nights as they wade through the seas of mud. But, incredibly, her mum seems happy with the letter and posts it right away. Five days later, there's a team of workmen jumping off the back of a lorry. They pass batches of quarry tiles to each other, hand over hand, and by the end of the day Dinah's house is the only one in the street to have twenty square metres of classy-looking terracotta paving all along the front.

Ta is astonished when he comes home but he's immediately suspicious.

‘What did you do?' he says.

‘Nothing,' Dinah's mum says, but she's a lousy actor. ‘Dee wrote a letter for me, that's all.'

‘What about?' he says.

‘About the mud,' Dinah's mum says.

But soon he's plucked it out of them and for a while he's furious. All his egalitarian sentiments are affronted by the way his wife has gone and pulled rank like this. But he doesn't mind for all that long, because his new second-hand Vespa is much happier standing on the paving. The Vespa's previous owner has seen fit to adorn the scooter with diaphanous girlie transfers, but Ta considers them an irrelevance, given that the scooter runs so well. And he's completely unbothered when the girlie transfers get the odd mention, as they do from time to time, in student publications.

To reach Dinah's road from South Ridge Road, you turn right at the Manor House which is now a block of expensive two-storey maisonettes. Then you pass the overgrown corrugated tin house that penniless, brainy Eva lives in with her refugee Hungarian dad. A tin house is not really suitable for a white person for all that it has pretty Edwardian fretwork and a balustraded verandah. Tin
houses everywhere are going under the bulldozer and there are lots and lots of bulldozers in Manor Gardens right now. It's a suburb that's expanding fast, even though no one has yet thought to develop the wooded green valley full of mango trees where white children go to build tree houses and Indian children go to pick the fruit for their parents to sell. This makes occasional brief opportunities for cross-race interaction, even if it's mainly name-calling.

‘
Arrah-charrah-vrot-banana
,' the white children chant.

And Dinah has an abortive friendship with a girl her own age from the Indian Girls' High. She has long, looped black plaits and her uniform is always snowy-white. They chat all the way on the journey from the bus stop round the valley and always part at the turn-off for the lower road. Yet Dinah can't remember what they talked about and she doesn't even know the girl's name. All she can remember is her own embarrassment when the girl one day uses the word mis-CHEEV-ious. She can remember being ashamed of her embarrassment.

There's a steep, hairpin bend at Nunhead Road just below where the Professor of Afrikaans-Nederlands lives, with his dapper little beard and his white safari suit. Dinah's road starts with the Cleggs' grocery shop which is called a Tearoom and General Store, but it doesn't serve tea. Most corner shops are run by Greek immigrants, but the Cleggs are immigrants from Shoreditch. Mr Clegg was a Barnado's boy and he likes to regale his customers with the story of his early life. He's a small, wiry man with blackened teeth, several of which are missing. Mr Clegg has been in the Merchant Navy and, since he's often stripped to the waist, but for his sleeveless vest, his nautical tattoos are much in evidence. He has an anchor on one bicep and a crucifix wound around with what looks like barbed wire on the other. Mr Clegg has a cockney accent. He drops his ‘h' sounds and says ‘v' instead of ‘th', but he always tells his customers that he once had an Oxford accent – that's before he lost it in the Navy.

‘I once had an Oxford accent,' he says, ‘and
vat's
the honest troof. Lost it in the Navy then, didn't I?'

Everyone knows that an Oxford accent is a combination of squashed, ultra-posh vowels and a tendency to pronounce one's ‘r' sounds as ‘w'. Dinah's dad once got sold a cheese dish in a department store by a man with an Oxford accent, so he can do an
Oxford accent to a tee – that's if ever he's called upon to do so.

Mrs Clegg is also from London. She's plump and sweaty with cropped pale-red hair and a bosom that she leans on the shop counter. The Cleggs have one grown-up son called Bobby. He's a fairly gormless young man who's supposed to be a helper in the shop, but most of the time he just lolls about with a stupid grin on his face. He has a very white beer belly and a mop of pale-ginger curls. So when Bobby gets a beautiful girlfriend with nice manners, everyone is surprised. The girlfriend is called Maria and she soon becomes Bobby's fiancée. She works in her future in-laws' shop, dealing efficiently with customers, while Mr Clegg hangs about smoking Capstans and Bobby occasionally pinches her bum or makes forays from the storeroom at the back to play practical jokes on her. Maria is a trim size ten and has the look of a young Jean Simmonds. She has dark hair and green eyes and she always wears a neat white blouse, topped with a cameo brooch. She wears a slim black pencil skirt with sheer nylons and size four black court shoes with little kitten heels.

The engagement is quite a long one, but finally the wedding day dawns and the shop is to be closed all day. Yet by midday its doors are open and it's business as usual, except that Mr Clegg is pacing up and down, smoking savagely, while Mrs Clegg is red-eyed and snivelling. The magistrate has turned up irregularities in Maria's papers. The beautiful fiancée is Coloured. Mrs Clegg is in shock and Mr Clegg is enraged. Only Bobby seems fairly unaffected. He's loping about grinning foolishly, just as if nothing has happened. Meanwhile, Maria is nowhere and she's never seen again: the charming, classy Jean Simmonds lookalike, who almost succeeded in appending herself to a family of deadbeat slobs in the cause of trying for white.

‘
Piccaninnies
,' Mr Clegg is saying viciously between puffs. ‘Blee-din'
piccaninnies
. Vat's what I could've ‘ad for grandchildren!'

Dinah's street is like a building site because quite a few plots have recently been sold. Two identical houses are going up directly across the road and, as they take shape, it's clear that they'll be a little bit more deluxe than Dinah's house and a little bit more traditional. They are more like the houses Dinah used to build with her Bayco building blocks and they have pyramidal brick-tiled
roofs and casement windows made of wood. But inside they're much darker because they don't have a picture window on to the verandah like Dinah's house and they have a lot more interior walls. The left-hand house gets dark-green drapes at all the windows and lampshades made out of sections of antiqued crackle parchment shaped like the skirts of a crinoline lady but with dangly green bobbles along the lower edges. Dinah knows this because she and Lisa are soon acquainted with the girl who lives in the left-hand house.