Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  There was more, but Gawie had torn off the rest to make his perfect square and I couldn’t find the rest of Oom Piet’s commentary in the bunch of paper hanging beside me on the wall. So I would never know what his personal opinion was going to be, but I don’t think it would have been very nice. Now I understood how Gawie knew everything and how he had invented his uncle in Pretoria. He’d read it all in Die Vaderland, which was the name of the newspaper we mostly got for shit paper. So I wiped my arse on another piece and carefully folded the one I’d just read and put it in my trouser pocket.

  The next morning I confronted Gawie on the way to school and said I was sorry about saying what he’d said was a load of bullshit. At first he didn’t want to know me. ‘Voetsek, Voetsek!’ he said, giving me a push. I persisted and told him I knew something that as far as I was concerned made him even cleverer than I already thought. So he brightened a bit and when we’d walked a few steps further he asked, ‘What?’

  I showed him the newspaper square and told him how inventing his uncle in Pretoria was a stroke of genius. He laughed and we were friends again and he said, ‘You didn’t really think I’d tell Meneer Prinsloo about the chicken feathers, did you, Voetsek?’

  ‘Ja,’ I laughed, ‘I thought I was in the deep shit, man! Already on my way to Pretoria.’

  ‘A regte Boer doesn’t betray his friends like the British do,’ he said piously.

  Gawie and me were friends again. What’s more, from then on he’d keep articles about the war and other stuff going on when he was tearing up squares, and we’d read them and talk about them. That’s how we knew about the English Channel and where Poland was and lots of other things. We could also carry on having our discussions at the library rock and read books of which we now had a big collection that formed the library Miss Phillips had promised I would one day own. By the way, Miss Phillips didn’t win the Easter Bonnet competition again because she didn’t have any proper feathers from a champion rooster. Adolf Hitler, Meneer Prinsloo’s new rooster, hadn’t won a single competition. Meneer Prinsloo said it was early times and he was coming along nicely and next year his tail feathers would be ready for action. Perhaps next year, which would be more than a year since I visited the scene of the crime, Miss Phillips would get a nice surprise slipped into her self-addressed envelope.

  I haven’t told you yet about Frikkie Botha and the great bridge explosion disaster. The local Stormjaer, the so-called soldiers of the Ossewabrandwag, were kept busy guarding Nationalist political meetings around the place from hecklers and proper soldiers. But in our district there wasn’t any opposition coming to disrupt and to heckle, as the Lebombo Mountain region was an Afrikaner stronghold. It got pretty boring with no opposition at the meetings, no Jews to be seen anywhere about the place, no army camp or soldiers getting ready to go off to war that you could beat up. What’s more, in our district there wasn’t any point in blowing up bridges or railway lines or telegraph poles or even the post office or police station because you’d only be harming yourself. Besides, in Duiwelskrans you’d have to answer to Sergeant Van Niekerk and his three dogs and that wouldn’t be at all funny.

  So there was Frikkie and other Stormjaers strutting around the place in shiny boots with their broomsticks, lead pipes, bicycle chains, knuckledusters, clubs and knives with nothing to do. Frikkie and his platoon of six other Stromjaers were jumping out of their pants for want of some real honest-to-goodness violent action. I should explain that the Stormjaers worked in groups of seven men, like a small platoon. There could be as many platoons as you liked in the district but only seven men in each who drilled and worked together to do things like guarding and sabotage. Frikkie’s platoon consisted of himself and Mevrou’s six brothers, later known as the ‘Van Schalkwyk Six’, even though there were seven of them at the beginning, the seventh being Frikkie Botha.

  So Frikkie and Mevrou’s six brothers hatched this bold plan to blow up a train carrying white Rhodesian soldiers to Durban who were joining South African troops going to fight overseas. Rhodesia was a country right next door to South Africa and about one hundred and fifty miles north of where we were. It was also on the side of Britain. It seems one of the Van Schalkwyk brothers had once been a guard on the South African railways and knew the railway line from Beit Bridge, which is on the Limpopo River, the natural border between Rhodesia and South Africa, and Pietersburg. The plan was to drive to near the border and find an isolated culvert or a donga with a small bridge over it and blow it up and derail the troop train.

  Frikkie Botha got some dynamite from a nearby goldmine and a miner showed him how to make a bomb, how to light a fuse and how best to blow up a small bridge. All of a sudden he was the big explosive expert around the place. I don’t want you to think that the Stormjaer were stupid or anything, and would just let an amateur like Frikkie go ahead and blow up a bridge. They had plenty of experts around the place that could have done it properly, but the district kommandant didn’t know it was going to happen because Frikkie’s platoon wanted to be heroes and hadn’t asked permission, just in case they were refused. They were sick and tired of guarding Nationalist Party meetings where nothing ever happened.

  So off they drove in a lorry with false numberplates, dressed in their farm clothes, not their uniforms, and without any other identification. They eventually got near to Beit Bridge where they hid the lorry off the main road. They carried the dynamite and fuses in a hessian sack and walked three miles to where the railway track was. They walked along it until they found this donga that was a dried-up creek with a small bridge over it that was miles from anywhere so nobody would hear the explosion when it went off. The plan was that they’d blow up the little bridge and the train coming later wouldn’t know about it. They’d be miles away when the engine fell into the donga. Boom! Easy as anything, man.

  As Frikkie was the one who got the instructions on how to make the bomb and where to plant it under the bridge, he got the job to climb under and put the bomb against one of the main girders. Knowing Frikkie Botha, he would have loved the opportunity to be a hero in the eyes of Mevrou’s six fierce brothers. Just to be the single outside member of a platoon with the six of them making up the remainder was a source of great pride to him. He’d once boasted to us, ‘Ag, man, we probably the best in the business and all we do is guard Nationalist Party meetings. If we were in Pretoria, Kommandant General Hans van Rensburg would give us all the really dangerous sabotage jobs, like blowing up the Union Building in Pretoria and the main railway station in Johannesburg.’

  The bomb was made of sticks of gelignite tied together with a long fuse that allowed you to light it and then get away in time to hide behind a rock or something before it went off. The little bridge was about twenty feet above the bottom of the donga. Frikkie climbed over the edge at the centre of the bridge and then worked his way underneath to the central steel girder. The rest of the bridge was made of wooden beams and it was this steel girder that had to be blown out so it would collapse. That’s where Frikkie was meant to put the bomb and then drop from a rope to the bottom of the donga. It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous because the fuse was long enough to allow plenty of time for Frikkie to get to where the six Van Schalkwyk brothers would be hiding from the blast.

  All went well and using a pair of pliers and some wire Frikkie tied the bomb securely to the steel girder. That’s when he made his first big mistake. He was supposed to let the fuse hang down from the bomb all the way to the ground and climb down the rope and light the fuse and run away to safety. But he forgot and lit the fuse while he was still under the top of the bridge. He realised what he’d done, and panicked and grabbed the rope to let himself down, at the same time he hit his head against the steel girder, and was knocked unconscious and fell to the bottom of the donga.

  When he didn’t get to safety the brothers took a look from where they were hiding and they must have seen Frikkie lying there, but they weren’t game to get closer as they could see the fuse spluttering spa
rks so they knew it was already alight. Ages went by and they could have easily rescued Frikkie because the fuse would take about three minutes to burn down, but nobody volunteered to go to help him. The longer they waited the more they panicked until Boom! Down came the bridge on top of Frikkie.

  When the smoke cleared, the Van Schalkwyk brothers ran over to the collapsed bridge and the first thing they saw was Frikkie’s severed hand lying in the dirt. Coming closer they saw that his skull had been fractured so they could see his brain, and his face was wiped off. They were sure that he was dead. There were wooden beams all over his body and one across his throat, and out of the bloody mess that was once his face his tongue stuck out like a little pink gravestone.

  This is what happened next. Remember, nobody knew they were there. They left Frikkie Botha, who was about to be mashed even further by a train engine falling on him. They walked the three miles through the bush back to the lorry and drove the hundred and fifty miles home to Duiwelskrans and back into the high mountains to their farm where they put the correct numberplates back on the lorry. Dead men tell no tales.

  But Frikkie Botha wasn’t dead. He’d just lost his face like Mattress had. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mattress was the more fortunate of the two because he died.

  Some blacks from the Venda tribe who lived in a village some way off heard the explosion and some umfaans came to see what the noise was all about. They found Frikkie and these black kids ran back to the village to tell the adults who came over and lifted up the beams. They saw Frikkie Botha was still alive so they made a makeshift stretcher of cowhide and carried him the three miles to Beit Bridge and from there he was taken to the hospital in Messina.

  One of the African men who rescued Frikkie applied a tourniquet to his arm and saved him from bleeding to death. That a black person would know how to do such a thing was a source of wonderment to the Afrikaans newspapers, which didn’t mention the real wonderment: that they’d carried him several miles through the bush when they could have easily left Frikkie Botha to die. The Vendas also posted men on the railway line to stop the troop train before it got to the collapsed bridge. But here’s the joke. It wasn’t even a troop train. It was a goods train carrying copper from Northern Rhodesia to Pretoria. The troop train was due to leave Salisbury the next morning, by which time the bridge had been temporarily repaired.

  The papers were full of the news of this man lying unconscious and in a critical state in the small hospital in Messina. He had no identification on him so he became known throughout South Africa as ‘The Faceless Man’. While everyone agreed it was an act of sabotage, there was nothing on him to suggest he was a Stormjaer who belonged to the Ossewabrandwag. So now Frikkie was also the ‘Lone Saboteur’, which suited the six Van Schalkwyk brothers down to the ground.

  At first we were all none the wiser at The Boys Farm. Frikkie was on his holidays and away for two weeks. He’d told everyone he was going to the Orange Free State to visit his auntie in a little dorp named Jacobsdal, which was in the opposite direction and several hundred miles from where the bridge had been blown up. The two weeks went by and the Faceless Man still hadn’t regained consciousness or been identified, and eventually the newspapers stopped putting him in. When Frikkie didn’t get back to The Boys Farm when he was supposed to, after a few days Meneer Prinsloo called Sergeant Van Niekerk who called the police station at Kimberley because Jacobsdal was such a tiny dorp it didn’t even have a policeman, let alone a police station. They sent a policeman to visit Frikkie’s auntie, who hadn’t laid eyes on him for sixteen years, ever since her sister’s funeral. So Sergeant Van Niekerk got the X-ray from Duiwelskrans hospital they’d taken when Mattress had broken Frikkie’s jaw and put it on the train addressed to the sergeant at the Messina police station and the mystery of the Faceless Man was solved. A picture of Frikkie when he’d been a boxer appeared in just about every newspaper in the land so that everyone knew what he’d looked like when he still had a face on him.

  They waited another week before Frikkie came out of his coma so they could hear his story. But guess what happened? The small wooden beam that had landed across his throat had permanently destroyed his vocal cords so he would never speak again.

  Now you’re asking, how do I know about what happened before Frikkie was discovered under the bridge when nobody else did? Well, I’ll tell you about that later, and it isn’t a very pretty story. In the meantime, this is what happened to Mevrou’s six brothers. The Van Schalkwyk Six, whom everyone in the district ended up thinking of as heroes in the Afrikaner resistance movement, went from bad to worse.

  You’d think they’d learn a lesson after the bridge disaster and that they’d leave exploding things alone, but no such thing. They still got bored doing nothing around Duiwelskrans so they took a weekend to go to Potchefstroom where they’d heard there were these big electricity pylons carrying powerlines. This time they were successful and managed to blow up two but they were caught minutes later. It was this act that made them famous as the Van Schalkwyk Six because they were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage, the first OBs in the Northern Transvaal (if you didn’t count Frikkie Botha) to became martyrs to the Afrikaner cause.

  Mevrou has six brothers in prison and is very proud. It’s not every day you have a genuine martyr in a family, but to have six is something you could never believe could happen and people were shaking her hand and making compliments all over the place.

  The next time I did something wrong and they called out my name after supper and I had to go to the sick room for punishment she said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Voetsek.’

  ‘Why, Mevrou?’ I asked, puzzled, because the reason I was getting the sjambok was that I’d forgotten to wash my hands before supper, which only meant three of the best.

  ‘Ja, well, you the rooinek and that’s nearly like being the Smuts government, you hear?’

  ‘No, Mevrou, I don’t like the Government like everybody else!’ I protested.

  Mevrou sighed. ‘It’s no use trying to get out of it, I’ve made up my mind, we have to remember the martyrs, so what you going to get is the Van Schalkwyk Six!’

  ‘But it’s only three for not washing your hands!’ I said.

  She pointed to my hands. ‘And what about the blood on your hands?’ she demanded.

  ‘Blood?’ I examined my hands. ‘There’s no blood on my hands, Mevrou.’

  ‘Ha! What about the concentration camps? If it wasn’t for the English taking our country when we didn’t do anything to them there wouldn’t be women and children killed in the concentration camps, and we wouldn’t be fighting this war on the wrong side. So then the six martyrs wouldn’t be rotting in a Pretoria prison!’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘Do you understand?’ She didn’t wait for me to reply. ‘Those martyrs, they are my own flesh and blood, you hear?’

  ‘I’m . . . I’m . . . very sorry, Mevrou,’ I stammered. ‘I was very sad to hear about your brothers.’ A big fat lie, of course, but it was a Boys Farm lie so it didn’t count against God.

  ‘Sorry? A name like yours with blood on his hands is all of a sudden sorry? How dare you insult me! Take down your pants, touch your toes!’

  I did as I was told.

  Whack! ‘Kobus!’ Whack! ‘Johannes!’ Whack! ‘Pietrus!’ Whack! ‘Kees!’ Whack! ‘Jakob!’ Whack! ‘Frans!’ Whack! ‘Me! Because I am from the same martyred family.’

  I now had Chinese martyr writing on my bum.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Love of Two Good Women

  THE DOMINEE DE JAGER was at it again because all of a sudden things were not going too smoothly for Adolf Hitler, who was meeting some opposition at long last. This seemed to upset the Great beard-chomping beetle because Hitler had decided to go to Russia instead of invading Britain and was now stuck in the snow. ‘I’m no general, you hear? But why is Adolf Hitler all of a sudden invading Russia? What has Russia done to us? The Afrikaner people have no quarrel with Russia!’ he declared ve
hemently.

  I could have told him it was because Hitler could get some oil for his tanks and stuff, and in England they’ve got no oil and in Russia they’ve got lots. Only his one big mistake was that he shouldn’t have gone to get it in the winter. We’d read all about it in Die Vaderland that Gawie had saved from his shit squares only the week before. But, of course, you can’t just stand up in church and explain to the congregation why Hitler had to go to Russia but should have gotten out before the winter came. One, the Dominee is too high up and a child can’t say anything to him. Two, with me being English they would think I was a spy, knowing stuff like that. Three, nobody in the congregation had ever seen snow and ice, and they wouldn’t know you could get so cold in Russia your toes and fingers fell off.

  So the Dominee thundered on. ‘The sooner there’s Germans marching all over Britain the better for the Afrikaner volk. Let the British see what it’s like to have the enemy knocking on your door for a change. You go to the door and you open it and standing right in front of you is a German officer! Maybe he just wants a cup of coffee, but maybe also he wants to come and live in your house, and then you’ve got to wait on him hand and foot, and if you got a daughter, watch out!’ The beetle started to munch his beard overtime. ‘I’m speaking from personal experience, you hear? When I was a small child it happened. One morning, knock, knock, knock, and my mother opens the door and there’s an English captain who is a ware rooinek with red hair on the stoep. And what’s worse, the English captain is really an Australian! Next to him is a man, an Afrikaner, who is holding a big fish!’ The Dominee stretched out his hands so we could all see how big the fish was. I can tell you that fish was definitely a big one. But later I learned people always exaggerate about fish, even a Dominee. ‘It’s a big barbel from the Vaal River that’s got whiskers ten inches long! “The captain wants you to cook it!” the Afrikaner, who is his translator, explains. My mother shakes her head. “Nee, Meneer Kaptein, it will taste like mud. You can’t eat that fish. That fish is a barbel and feeds on the river’s bottom, it is no good.” The translator, who should be ashamed for working for the British, explains what my mother says about the barbel. “Cook it!” the English captain demands, going all red in the face and shaking his finger at my mother. Next thing he is living with my family, sleeping in my mother’s bedroom in the bed I was born in, sleeping lekker under the goosefeather quilt my ouma made for her glory box, long before she died in the concentration camp!’