Frankie and Stankie (30 page)

‘Excuse me, Miss Legge,' Adele calls out, ‘but who exactly were the Fascists?'

Miss Legge pauses in shock. The darting eyes look up and finally fix their poison rays on the speaker. ‘They were a rival party to the Communists,' she snaps. ‘Don't interrupt.'

Then she reads on. Gibble-gabble, gibble-gabble, gab-gab-blah.

‘Excuse me, Miss Legge,' Adele says, again, ‘but what I mean is, what did the Fascists actually believe in?'

Miss Legge stops to flick her silvery snake-like tongue. ‘They were a rival party to the Communists,' she says. ‘I've already told you once and that's enough. One more peep out of you, Adele – '

‘Ask Yael,' drawls bad-girl Beattie pointedly. She's showing her insubordinate side in history for the very first time, though she's admittedly been busy behind the scenes, stoking the idea that Miss Legge doesn't wear a bra. ‘Yael will know what a Fascist is,' she says. ‘Ask
her
.'

Miss Legge promptly dispatches Beattie to stand outside the classroom door, whilst shy, myopic Yael is hanging her head and trying not to smile. Yael is an Israeli brainbox with highbrow parents on sabbatical. She's been billeted so temporarily upon GHS that the teacher's pet has not yet bothered to regard her as serious competition. The moment passes. Miss Legge proceeds. Gibble-gabble, gibble-gabble, gab-gab-blah.

The notes are not of Miss Legge's own composition. They've been written by Miss Norris, the long-ago head of history, a spellbinding teacher, by all accounts, and a dyed-in-the-wool Durban racist, whose notes on the coming of Indian indentured labour Dinah will for ever hold by heart.

‘The first shipload of coolies arrived in November 1860. Although the first few cargoes were unsatisfactory and had to be repatriated as unfit for work, later importations were more satisfactory…'

These notes cause Dinah and Maud to roll about on the lawn and shriek with laughter until the tears are streaming from their eyes and their clothes are full of grass. They enact absurd burlesques with each other, miming to chisel open wooden shipping crates.

‘Another rotten crate of curry balls!' Maud says, in her customs-officer voice. ‘Nail it up again and throw it into the sea! Next!'

‘Curry ball' is an expression that Maud has overheard recently during the course of her first date and she's told Dinah all about it. She's gone in a foursome to the Cuban Hat Drive-in Restaurant on North Beach, where her date's best friend's date has used the expression on one of the Indian waiters.

‘Hey, Curry ball!' the best friend's date has yelled. ‘Hey, Curry ball? Aren't you going to serve us?'

At the Cuban Hat a waiter will clip your hamburger and Coke to your motor-car window on a special custom-built tray.

Maud and Dinah are fond of Miss Bardsey who teaches music. She has one thin polio leg and wears support stockings with orthopaedic
sandals. Once a week she does music appreciation with Dinah's class in her quarters beyond the corridor where the cycle racks are housed. Miss Bardsey behaves as if she's got a soft spot for the two girls, possibly because, along with Yael, they're the only ones in the class who've ever heard of Khachaturian. Or perhaps it's merely because she wants to redeem them from the slouchy reputation they've acquired with most of the staff. Perhaps she's disempowering the girls with kindness. She lets them take her records home and she chooses them for the choir.

On one occasion, she picks them for sending off to a residential music school which takes place in a mock-Gothic boys' public school in the country near Henrietta's farm. The music school is all Sir Hubert Parry in the chapel and High Anglican ritual. The girls are enchanted by the whole thing and the music master is fab. They make friends with a trio of pitch-perfect counter tenors who are all pupils at the school. Two of them are currently being tormented by their gender leanings and the third is keen on Maud. Their talk is a constant unfamiliar innuendo of buggery and cold showers and ritual beatings by prefects, though just sometimes they'll talk to the girls about music.

‘Never heard of Bax?' they say. ‘Arnold Bax? Master of the Queen's Music?'

But neither Dinah nor Maud has ever heard of Arnold Bax.

On the fourth night Maud has arranged to meet one of the boys in the dead of night by escaping out of the window. Dinah helps her knot bedsheets together once everyone else is asleep. Dinah is leaning anxiously over the sill, hoping to clock Maud's progress, but the country darkness is absolute and she can't see a thing. Then she hears a thud and a feeble groan, because Maud, instead of descending hand over hand, has proceeded by sliding down at speed until her hands reach the first knot – at which point they spring apart. She's fallen into the courtyard from a height of something like ten feet. And all the doors are locked. Just as Dinah is about to swing her leg over the sill in rescue, a light snaps on in Matron's bedroom and all hope is lost.

Once Maud has been sent packing in disgrace, the music school stops being fun. And what's puzzling to Dinah is that she's the only person who ever seems to understand why Maud felt she had to do it. The knotted sheet escape was nothing to do with wanting to
commit sex in the small hours with a schoolboy. It had to do with the school's Gothic setting. It required a Gothic response, a Gothic school-story response.

Maud and Dinah especially love Miss Bardsey's tolerant coexistence with the bicycles which are stacked in overlapping formation, right outside her domain. Just one nudge of the first bicycle in the row and the whole lot will come down.

Then Miss Bardsey will always rush out, waving her stick-thin arms and calling out, entirely without recrimination, ‘Crisis girls, crisis! All hands to the pump!'

It means that Maud and Dinah feel impelled to send the bicycles crashing at the rate of once a fortnight. And dear Miss Bardsey is always equally obliging over Maud's missing bus fare.

‘I've lost it, Miss Bardsey,' Maud will say.

Unlike Dinah, whose parents regularly fill in the scholar's season-ticket form and get it rubber-stamped at the depot, Maud never has a season ticket and her bus money's usually nowhere. Some days she'll start out with the money, but it falls through the holes in her blazer pockets or – if ever her mother has given her the whole week's money in advance – she and Dinah will have spent it before the time is out. At such times Miss Bardsey will invariably act as Maud's personal loan facility, though Maud, who always means to pay her back, merely goes around feeling guilty. That's until the Cherubino song, which causes her feelings of guilt to rise uncomfortably.

Miss Bardsey likes to provide the choir with her own eccentric translations of Italian or German arias, and one day she's translated Cherubino's
Voi Che Sapete
. She's rendered this as ‘Say Ye Who Borrow'.

Say ye who borrow

Love's witching spell,

What is this sorrow

None can dispel?

‘Oh God, I can't bear to look at her,' Maud says. ‘I'm so ashamed, Dinah. I'm so ashamed. It's all about my bus fare, don't you see?'

‘No it isn't,' Dinah says. ‘It's just to rhyme with sorrow. That's all. Borrow – sorrow.'

‘Oh God. Now I'll have to give up choir,' Maud says. ‘It's so unfair, but I will. I'll have to.'

The irony is that Maud's actually got her bus fare that day, plus exactly a penny to spare, so after choir practice the girls dawdle to the bus stop via the chip shop where, the day before, they have watched a group of Zulu schoolchildren asking for penny scraps.

‘Penny scraps, please,' Maud says, having never tried this before. The chip-shop lady gives her a whole bag full of those delicious little dripping-soaked crunchy bits that have fallen through the basket into the fryer. The penny scraps are a marvel, a taste sensation to delight the palate, so Maud keeps on asking for them day after day. But on the fourth day the chip-shop lady has suddenly turned unwilling.

‘Penny scraps is just for the native kiddies,' she says. ‘The natives has only got pennies. You kids has got to buy proper chips, or else you can get out of my shop. Go on. Scram, the both of you!'

Maud and Dinah slink away, mortified in the knowledge that, for four days running, they've been stealing from the poor.

‘Eating in uniform' is a very bad crime and one Miss Maidment periodically lectures against in assembly. It's easily as bad as ‘leaving litter' and Dinah can remember one occasion when an unclaimed apple core on the window-sill of the assembly hall caused the whole school to be kept in for three days running because nobody would own up. ‘Disrespect for school uniform' is another very bad crime, so Maud and Dinah are forever being hauled before the prefects. ‘Wearing an indoor garment outdoors' means you've got your cardigan on in the street instead of your blazer. Or there's ‘winter uniform in summer' which means you're wearing your navy beret instead of your panama hat. These things seems totally irrelevant to the two girls and quite peripheral to the educational process. But the prefects will never agree to engage them in honest debate.

‘When you're in the sixth form, then
you
can tell the juniors to wear proper uniform,' they say.

This is all the prefects will ever venture.

‘
Pathetic
,' Maud says. ‘You people are
pathetic
. As if we'd ever want to do such a puerile thing.'

They admire and envy Yael who, being protected by cultural difference as well as by star quality in maths, has managed, without
appearing dissident, to carve out a niche for herself as the classroom's licensed eccentric. Yael has the best solution to the periodic GHS hat blitz – a surprise event known as the hat parade. She keeps her panama, folded and firmly compressed, right at the bottom of her desk, so that, whenever the summary hat parade is announced, Yael is never without headgear, albeit somewhat misshapen. There'll be a long line of girls looking like the AGM of the Women's Bowling Confederation, and then there'll be Yael, myopically sporting a topknot that looks like an inverted zig-zag ice-cream cone, a fluted scarecrow's hat spitting bits of straw. Yael has also pointed Maud and Dinah to an unlocked storeroom beyond the music room where, inexplicably, along with old rakes and theatrical costumes, there's a large fish-moth trunk of abandoned property – an endless lucky dip of mouse-nibbled replacement berets and cardigans and ties.

While Lisa's Afrikaans teacher is the gorgeous, glammed-up Mrs Prinsloo, Maud and Dinah are blessed with Mrs Keithley. Mrs Prinsloo wears figure-hugging sheath dresses with broad gold belts and gold hoop earrings. Her DNA is sexily shouting its evidence of early racial mixing with green-eyed Cape Malay slaves. Mrs Keithley, on the other hand, is a tired-looking grey-haired Afrikaner woman who is rumoured to have been abandoned by an abusive Scottish husband. Unlike the triumphant Mrs Prinsloo who has no problem with negotiating the enemy minefield of an English-language girls' school, Mrs Keithley lacks her advantages and misreads every cue. Whenever the girls have completed their classwork, for example, Mrs Keithley will let them read Afrikaans women's magazines for a special treat – magazines about which they are openly and gleefully snobbish.

So now Dinah and Maud, having learned their Afrikaans poem off by heart, and having recited it to Mrs Keithley's satisfaction, are given an issue of
Die Huisgenoot
to share, which they find particularly rewarding. Because not only has
Die Huisgenoot
, on this occasion, got a haunchy peroxide blonde in pink tutu on the cover, who is striking a pirouette pose in what appears to be the middle of a maize field, but there's a double page, full-colour centre spread of the entire Springbok rugby team. The magazine is issued on the sort of cheap newsprint paper which causes the colour reproductions
to give everyone two sets of eyebrows. Plus the Springbok rugby team, even without double eyebrows, represents everything that the girls most hold in contempt.

The South African rugby team is both ethnically and ideologically dominated by white-supremacist Afrikaners. It represents the government's triumphalist racist Nationalism, rampant and brutal, on the playing field. And then there's the fact of the players' physiognomy. The rugby men are like a species on their own. They all have incredibly thick necks and massive shoulders and cabbage ears and close-cropped bullet heads. These are features that are wholly out of kilter with the girls' current heart-throb material which runs much more to a precious, faggoty English public schoolboy look, complete with washboard chest and Rupert Brooke profile. So cricketers are sometimes OK heart-throb material. Rugby players, never.

Just recently, during one of their malingering sessions in town, Dinah and Maud have encountered two members of the touring MCC and have followed these demi-gods into a record shop in West Street, where they eye them up as the men are waiting at the counter to be served.

‘Quick!' Maud says and she dives into the display racks. ‘Let's have this one.'

Dinah can see that she's holding up a record of the choir of King's College, Cambridge. Both girls know that one of the two earmarked cricketers is a King's and Cambridge man. At the counter, they stand and stare meaningfully at the two men just ahead of them in line, while flashing the record sleeve with conspicuous intent.

‘I DO think the King's College Choir is WON-derful,' Maud is saying in loud slow-motion speak. ‘Don't you, Dinah?'

Then it's the cricketers' turn to get served. ‘Have you got Bill Haley and the Comets?' one of them says.

It's the Cambridge man himself. The men pay for the record as quickly as they can and hurry out of the shop, clearly hoping to give their stalkers the slip.

‘Damn!' Maud says. ‘Bill Haley and the Comets. Of course!'