‘It is a fine sunset, ja? Always here is the best place.’ I looked behind me, and there was a tall, thin man, taller, much taller and perhaps even thinner than my granpa. He wore a battered old bush hat and his snowy hair hung down to the top of his shoulders. His face was clean shaven, wrinkled and deeply tanned, while his eyes were an intense blue and seemed too young for his face. He wore khaki overalls without a shirt and his arms and chest were also tanned. The legs of his overalls, beginning just below the knees, were swirled in puttees which wound down into socks rolled over the tops of a pair of stout hiking boots. Strapped to his back was a large canvas bag from which, rising three feet into the air directly behind his head, was a cactus, spines of long, dangerous thorns protruding from its dark green skin. Cupped in his left hand he held a curious-looking camera which appeared to be secured by a leather strap about his neck.
‘You must excuse me, please, I have taken your picture. At other times I would not do such a thing. It is not polite. It was your expression. Ja, it is always the expression that is important. Without expression the human being is just a lump of meat. You have some problems I think, ja?’
At the sound of his voice I had stood up hastily and now faced him a little sheepishly, looking down at him from the rock, a good six feet higher than where he stood. He made a gesture at me and the rock and even at the sky beyond.
‘I shall call it Boy on a Rock.’ He paused and cocked his head slightly to one side. ‘I think this is a good name. I have your permission, yes?’ I nodded and he seemed pleased. Dropping the camera so that it hung around his neck, he extended his right hand up towards me. He was much too far away for our hands to meet but I stuck mine out too and we both shook the air in front of us. This seemed to be a perfectly satisfactory introduction. ‘Von Vollensteen, Professor Von Vollensteen.’ He withdrew his hand and gave me a stiff little bow from the waist.
‘Peekay,’ I said, withdrawing my hand at the same time as he dropped his. His friendliness was infectious and no hint of condescension showed in his manner. Best of all, I could hear nothing going on behind the scenes.
‘Peekay? P-e-e-k-a-y, I like this name, it has a proper sound. I think a name like this would be good for a musician.’ He squinted up at me, thinking, then took a sharp intake of breath as though he had reached an important decision. ‘I think we can be friends, Peekay,’ he said.
‘Why aren’t the thorns from that cactus sticking into your back?’ The canvas bag was much too lightly constructed to protect him from the vicious three-inch thorns.
‘Ha! This is a goot question, Peekay. I will give you one chance to think of the answer then you must pay a forfeit.’
‘You first took off all the thorns on the part that’s in the bag.’
‘Ja, this is possible, also a very goot answer,’ he shook his head slowly, ‘but not true. Peekay, I am sorry to say you owe me a forfeit and then you must try again for the answer.’ He stroked his chin. ‘Now let me see… Ja! I know what we shall do. You must put your hands like so,’ he placed his hands on his hips, ‘at once we will stand on one leg and say, “No matter what has happened bad, today I’m finished from being sad. Absoloodle!”’
I stood on the rock, balanced on one leg with my hands on my hips, but each time I tried to say the words the laughter would bubble from me and I’d lose my balance. Soon we were both laughing fit to burst. Me on the rock and Professor Von Vollensteen dancing below me on the ground, slapping his thighs, the cactus clinging like a green papoose to his back. I could get the first part all right, but the ‘Absoloodle!’ at the end proved too much and I would topple, overcome by mirth.
Spent with laughter, Professor Von Vollensteen finally sat down, and taking a large red bandanna from the pocket of his overalls, wiped his eyes. ‘My English is not so goot, ja?’ He beckoned me to come down and sit beside him. ‘Come, no more forfeiting, too dangerous, perhaps I die laughing next time. Come, Peekay, I will show you the secret.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder indicating the cactus. ‘But first you must introduce yourself to my prickly green friend who has a free ride on my back.’
I scrambled down from the rock and came to stand beside him. ‘Peekay, this is Euphorbia grandicornis, he is a very shy cactus and very hard to find in these parts.’
‘Hello,’ I said to the cactus, not quite knowing what else to say.
‘Goot, now you have been introduced you can see why Mr Euphorbia grandicornis does not scratch my back.’ I walked behind him and looked into the canvas bag. Inside was a small collapsible shovel and the roots of the cactus were swaddled in hessian and tied with coarse string. The part of the bag resting on Professor Von Vollensteen’s back was made of leather too thick for the long thorns to penetrate. ‘Not so stupid, ha?’ he said with a grin.
‘Aaw! If you’d given me another chance I would’ve got it,’ I said, immediately convincing myself that this was so.
‘Ja, for sure! It is always easy to be a schmarty pantz when you know already the trick.’
‘Honest, Mr Professor Von Vollensteen, I think I could’ve known the answer,’ I protested, anxious now to impress him.
‘Okay! Then I give you one chance more. A professor is not a mister but a mister can be a professor. Answer me that, Mister Schmarty Pantz?’
I sat down on a small rock trying to work this out, my heart sank, for I knew almost immediately he had the better of me. I had simply thought his first name, like Peekay, was a little unusual. I had never heard of anyone called Professor, but then I was also the first Peekay I knew of, so who was I to judge?
‘I give up, sir,’ I said, feeling rather foolish. ‘What is a professor?’ He had removed the canvas bag from his back and once again held the camera cupped in his hands.
‘Peekay, you are a genius my friend! Look what we find under this rock where you are sitting. This is Aloe microsfigma!’ I rose from the rock and joined him on his knees looking underneath it. A small cluster of tiny spotted aloes, each not much bigger than a two-shilling piece grew in the grass at the base of the rock. Even at close quarters they would have been hard to see and to an untrained eye almost impossible. The old man brushed the grass out of the way, and lying flat on his tummy he focused the camera on the tiny succulents. Behind him the sunset bathed the plants in a red glow. ‘The light is perfect but I must work quick.’ His hands, fumbling with the camera, were shaking with excitement. Finally he clicked the shot and got slowly back to his knees. Removing a Joseph Rogers from the pocket of his overalls, he used the small knife to separate four of the aloes, leaving twice as many behind. He held the tiny plants in his hand for me to see. ‘Wunderbar, Peekay, small but so perfect, a good omen for our friendship.’
I must say I was not too impressed but I was glad that he was happy. ‘You haven’t said what a professor is.’
He wrapped the tiny aloes in his bandanna and placed them carefully into his canvas bag which he then slung back over his shoulder. ‘Ja, I like that, you have good concentration, Peekay. What is a professor? That is a goot question.’ He stood looking at the dying sun. ‘A professor is a person who drinks too much whisky and once plays goot Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart and even sometimes when it was not serious, Chopin. Such a person who could command respect in Vienna, Leipzig, Warsaw and Budapest and also, ja, once in London.’ His shoulders sagged visibly. ‘A professor is also some person who can not anymore command respect from little girls who play not even schopstics goot.’
I could see his previous mood of elation had changed and there was a strange conversation going on in his head. But then, just as suddenly, his eyes regained their sparkle. ‘A professor is a teacher, Peekay. I have the honour to be a teacher of music.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. It was the first time he had touched me and the gesture was unthinking and friendly, like another kid might hold you when you are playing. ‘You can call me Doc. You see I am also Doctor of Music, it is all the same thing. I am too old and you are too young for Mister this or Professor that. You and me will not hide behind such a small importance. Just Peekay and Doc. I think this is a goot plan?’
I nodded agreement, though I was too shy to say the word out loud. He seemed to sense my reluctance. ‘What is my name, Peekay?’ he asked casually.
‘Doc,’ I replied shyly. Hoppie was the only other adult with whom I had been on such familiar terms and I found it a little frightening.
‘One hundred per cent! For this I give you eleven out of ten. Absoloodle!’ he said and we both started to laugh.
The sun sets quickly in the bushveld and we hurried down the hill, small rocks rolling ahead of us as we raced to beat the dark. Below us the first lights were coming on, the chimneys were beginning to smoke as tired servants prepared supper for their white mistresses before washing the dishes and going home to the native location.
‘So it is you who live now in the English rose garden,’ Doc said when we reached the dark line of mulberry trees. ‘Soon I will show you my cactus garden.’ While it was too dark to see his face, I sensed his smile. ‘We will meet again, my goot friend Peekay.’ He touched me lightly and I watched his tall, shambling figure with the Euphorbia grandicornis sticking up beyond his head moving into the gathering darkness.
‘Good night, Doc!’ I said, and then on a whim shouted, ‘Euphorbia grandicornis and Aloe microsfigma!’
The old man turned in the dark, ‘Magnificent, Peekay. Absoloodle!’
Euphorbia grandicornis, I rolled the name around in my head. Such a posh name for a silly old cactus with thorns. I wondered briefly how it might sound as a name for a fighter, but almost immediately rejected it. Euphorbia grandicornis was no name for the next welterweight champion of the world.
When I entered the kitchen, Dum and Dee averted their eyes and Dee said, ‘The missus wants to see you, Inkosikaan.’ She looked at me distressed. Dum walked over and reached out and touched me.
‘We have put some food under your bed in the pot for night water,’ she whispered and they clutched each other and whimpered in their anxiety that they might be discovered.
I knocked on the door of my mother’s sewing room. ‘Come in,’ she said and looked up as I entered. Then she bent over her sewing machine and put her foot down on the motor and sewed away for quite a while.
Of course, she did not know she was dealing with a veteran of interrogation and punishment and since I had suddenly grown up on the hill, I was uncrackable. A real hard case.
After a while she stopped, and taking off her glasses she rubbed the top of her nose with her forefinger and thumb and gave a deep sigh. ‘You have hurt me and you have hurt the Lord very deeply,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t you know the Lord loves you?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘The gospel says, whosoever harms a hair upon the head of one of my little ones, harmeth me also.’
I had heard the same thing said by Pik Botha, which just about confirmed everything I thought about the Lord. Pik Botha and my mother and Pastor Mulvery were all working for the same person.
My mother continued, ‘When I had my quiet time with the Lord this afternoon, He spoke to me. You will not get a beating, but He is not mocked and you will go to your room at once without your supper.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ I said and turned to go.
‘Just a moment! You have not apologised to me for your behaviour.’ Her eyes were suddenly sharp with anger.
I hung my head just like I used to do with Mevrou. ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I said.
‘Not sorry enough, if you ask me. Do you think it’s easy for me trying to make ends meet? I’m not supposed to get tired. I’m only your mother, the dogsbody about the place. All you care about is that black woman, that stinking black Zulu woman!’ She suddenly lost her anger and her eyes filled with the tears of self-pity. Grabbing the dress she had been sewing she held it up to her eyes, her thin shoulders shaking, and began to sob. ‘I don’t think I can take much more, first your grandfather and then those two in the kitchen and now you!’ She looked up at me, her pretty face distorted and ugly from crying. Then, with a sudden little wail, she once again buried her head in the dress and started to sob hysterically.
I felt enormously relieved. This was much more like my old mother. She was having one of her turns, and I knew exactly what to do. ‘I’ll get you a nice cup of tea and an Aspro and then you must have a good lie down,’ I said and left the room.
Dum and Dee were delighted that I hadn’t received a beating and hurriedly made me a pot of tea and then turned it around and around on the kitchen table to make it brew quickly. Dee handed me two Aspro from a big bottle kept in a cupboard above the sink and I put them in my pocket, for I was afraid that if I put them on the saucer I’d slop tea over them.
My mother was sitting at the machine unpicking stitches as I entered the sewing room. Her eyes were red from crying but otherwise she seemed quite composed. I put the cup of tea down carefully on the table next to the machine and fished in my pocket for the Aspro which I placed next to the cup. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a tight voice, not looking up at me. ‘Now go straight to your room, you may not come out until morning.’
It was light punishment, I had expected far worse. In the chamberpot Dum and Dee had left three cold sausages, two big roast potatoes and a couple of mandarins, a proper feast. There wasn’t much else to do but go to sleep after that. It had been a long day and a very good one. The loneliness birds had flown away and I had grown up and made a new friend called Doc and had learned several new things. Euphorbia grandicornis was an ugly green cactus with long, dangerous looking thorns, Aloe microsfigma was a tiny, spotted aloe which liked to hide under rocks, and a professor was a teacher who taught music. Also, there was a rose called Mrs Butt and another called Imperial Sunset.
Tomorrow I would write a letter to Nanny and send her my ten shillings. She would like that and she would know that somebody loved her. I fell asleep thinking about how big the hole would have to be to bury Big Hettie in, about Hoppie fighting Adolf Hitler, which would probably be an easier fight than the one against Jackhammer Smit, and how I was going to become welterweight champion of the world.
Two days later I was sitting on the front stoep watching army trucks passing the front door, for I had discovered that an army camp was being set up in the valley about three miles out of town. The big khaki Bedford, Chevrolet and Ford trucks, their backs covered with canvas tarpaulin canopies, had been passing for two days. Some contained soldiers who sat in the back carrying .303 rifles. But mostly they carried tents and timber and other things needed for building an army camp.
My granpa, when he heard the news on the wireless, had said it was typical of the army big-wigs, putting a military camp at the end of a branch line, which couldn’t move troops out fast enough to anywhere, least of all to Lourenço Marques, where the Portuguese couldn’t be relied on to maintain their neutrality for one moment.
My Adolf Hitler fears returned immediately. Lourenço Marques, I discovered, was no more than eighty miles away if they came through Swaziland. I was glad that my granpa had Nanny’s address in Zululand and that I had sent her off a postal order for my ten shillings, my love in a letter and a photograph taken much earlier showing her holding me. If she couldn’t get somebody to read the letter, she’d know it was from me and my original escape plan would still be intact.
I was also glad the army was so close at hand. Lourenço Marques, the nearest seaport, was obviously where Adolf Hitler planned to march all the Rooineks from these parts into the sea. Even an army at the end of a branch line was better than no army at all.
My mother added that Lourenço Marques was probably seething with German spies at this very moment, and they were probably using code words on Radio Lourenço Marques to relay messages to the Boer Nazis who were plotting to tear down the country from within. I thought about the Judge and Mr Stoffel and how they always listened to the wireless. When my granpa said that was a lot of poppycock, I was not so sure.
I thought about these things as I watched a convoy of one hundred and five army trucks go by, the biggest yet by far, so I didn’t notice Doc coming up the hill until he almost reached the gate.
‘Goot morning, Peekay.’ He was dressed in a white linen suit and wore a panama hat, so that I hardly recognised him. He carried a string bag and a silver-handled walking stick and under one arm was a large manila envelope.
‘Good morning, Doc,’ I said, jumping to my feet. I found it a little strange to say his name out loud, though in my head I’d said it a thousand times.
‘I can come in, ja?’ I hurried down the steps to open the gate. ‘This is an official visit, Peekay, I have come to see your mother.’
I felt stupidly disappointed. I hadn’t known he knew my mother. I followed him up the steps. ‘You will introduce us please,’ he said as we reached the verandah.
Unreasonably pleased that I was his first friend, I opened the front door and led him into the parlour. Visitors to the farm had been infrequent but the routine was unerring. First you sat people down and then you gave them coffee and cake. I asked Doc to sit down and he did so but not before he had stood in the centre of the zebra skin and slowly turned around taking the room in. When he reached the grandfather clock he paused and said, ‘English, London, about 1680, a very good piece.’ He took a gold Hunter from his fob pocket, and snapping it open examined it briefly. ‘Four minutes a month,’ he said, returning the watch to his pocket. I was amazed he should know how much our grandfather clock lost, for he was right. I thought perhaps my granpa had told him.
‘Do you know my granpa?’ I asked Doc.
‘I have not yet had this pleasure but it will be okay, we are both men of thorns, with me the cactus, with him the rose. The English and the Germans are not so far apart. It will be all right, you will see.’ He said this just as I was about to leave the room to get Dum and Dee to bring coffee and cake.
I was dumbfounded, Professor Von Vollensteen was a German! What should I do? My grandfather had gone to the library in town to change his books, that was one good thing anyway. You never knew what he might do coming face to face with a German, although even against Doc I didn’t fancy his chances. I decided to say nothing to my mother, she might have a conniption on the spot.
Dum and Dee had somehow known we had a guest and were putting out the tea things and half a canary cake on a plate. I could hear the sewing machine zizzing away as I walked over to the far side of the house to tell my mother she had a guest. I knocked before opening the door.
‘There is someone to see you, Mother,’ I shouted over the sound of the whirring machine. She stopped sewing and looked up.
‘Tell her to come in, darling, it must be Mrs Cameron about her skirt.’
‘It is Professor Von Vollensteen. He wants to see you,’ I said in a low voice.
‘Professor whom?’ she asked, removing her glasses and looking directly at me.
‘He is a teacher, a teacher of music,’ I said urgently in an attempt to hide my confusion. She rose to her feet and patted her hair and reached for her bag. From it she took a compact and, looking into the tiny mirror on the inside flap of the bag, hurriedly powdered her nose.
‘Well he can’t teach music here, we haven’t got that sort of money,’ she said, putting the pad back into the compact and snapping it shut. I followed behind her, not at all sure of the reception Doc would get.
But my mother was country-bred and all visitors were treated courteously no matter what their purpose. Doc rose from the lounge as she entered and extended his hand. ‘Madame,’ he said, bowing slightly, ‘Professor Karl Von Vollensteen.’
My mother extended her hand and Doc took it lightly and bowed over it bringing his heels together. ‘Please sit down, Professor, will you take coffee with us?’ She reached no higher than his waist and when he sat down her head was level with his.
‘You are very kind, madame. Today we have two things.’ He reached into the string bag at his feet and produced a jam tin which held a small plant. The plant had only two leaves which stuck straight up out of the tin and were tinged with pink around the edges. They looked exactly like two light green rabbit ears. ‘Allow me please to introduce Kalanchoe thyrsiflora, quite rare in these parts, often mistaken for a plant, but I assure you, madame, a true cactus.’ Doc handed the jam tin to my mother who remarked that she couldn’t possibly remember the name and laughed her nervous laugh. ‘Ja, it is a difficult name but, if you wish, you may just call it Rabbit Ears,’ Doc said charitably, though he somehow left the impression that the little cactus was demeaned by such a common name.
Dum and Dee entered, Dee carrying a tray with cups and cake and Dum carrying the china coffee pot we used for visitors. Dee set the tray on the traymobile and carefully wheeled it over to my mother who sent her back to fetch a knife for the cake. Dum, keeping her back straight and her arm rigid, bent her knees almost to the ground so she could put the coffee pot down on the traymobile without any possibility of spilling it. Dum, too, was sent back to the kitchen, for the coffee strainer.
‘You can tell them a hundred times over, it’s useless. I don’t know what goes on inside their heads,’ my mother sighed, putting the tiny plant on the shelf under the traymobile. I had been standing beside her chair and now she turned to me. ‘Run along now’.
Doc looked up. ‘With your permission, madame, I would like for Peekay to stay please?’
‘Who?’ my mother said.
‘Your son, madame, I would much like him to stay.’
My mother turned to me. ‘What on earth have you been telling the professor? Who is Peekay?
‘It’s my new name. I, I haven’t told you about it yet,’ I said, flustered. My mother laughed, but I knew she was annoyed.
‘Why, you have a perfectly good name, my dear.’ She gave me a funny look, then turned to Doc. ‘Of course he may stay, but I’m afraid our family never had much of an ear for music and lessons would be much too expensive.’
Without looking at Dee and Dum, who had re-entered the room and now stood beside her, she held her hand out for the knife and strainer and dismissed them with an impatient flick of her head.
‘I am most grateful, madame.’ My mother lifted the coffee pot. ‘Black only, no sugar,’ Doc said, leaning forward in anticipation.
My mother poured his coffee. ‘A nice piece of cake, professor?’ Doc put his hand up in refusal. ‘Thank you,’ he said. It was a speech habit I was going to find hard to get used to, saying, ‘Thank you,’ when he meant, ‘No thank you,’ and clearly my mother misunderstood him for she placed a piece of the canary cake on a sideplate and handed it to him with his coffee. He accepted the cake without further protest.
Doc put the coffee and cake on the zebra hide between his legs and picked up the manila envelope. ‘And so now we have the second thing.’ His eyes sparkled as he handed the envelope to my mother.
‘Goodness, what can it be?’ she said, pulling out the tucked-in flap of the large brown envelope. She withdrew the largest photograph I had ever seen which, to my amazement, turned out to be me sitting on the rock on top of the hill. ‘Goodness gracious!’ My mother stared at it, momentarily lost for words. The photograph showed every detail, even the lichen on the rock, more clearly than any I had seen before. Shafts of sunlight shining through a silver-edged cloud seemed to be directed straight at the rock on which I sat. My body, half in shadow, appeared to be as one with the rock. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an extraordinary picture. At last my mother spoke. ‘Wherever did you take this? It is so sad! Why did you take a picture of him when he was looking sad?’
Doc rubbed his chin, it was plainly not the comment he expected and he needed a moment to think about the answer. Ignoring the first question he leaned forward as he answered the second. ‘Ja, this is so. Only one great picture shows a man when he smiles. Frans Hals, Laughing Cavalier, early seventeenth century.’ He pointed at the grandfather clock. ‘Around that time they make this clock also. The smile, madame, is used by humans to hide the truth, the artist is only interested to reveal the truth.’ He leaned back, clearly satisfied with his reply.
‘Goodness, professor, all that is much too deep for simple country people like us. He’s only a very little boy, you know? I prefer him to smile.’
‘Of course! But sadness, like understanding, comes early in life for some. It is part of intelligence.’
My mother’s back stiffened. ‘You seem to know a lot about my son, professor. I can’t imagine how, he has only been home from boarding school for three days.’
Doc clapped his hands gleefully. ‘Boarding school! Ha, that explains I think everything. For a boy like this boarding school is a prison, ja?’
My mother was beginning to show her impatience, her fingers tapped steadily on the arms of the chair, a sure sign that things were not going well. ‘We had no choice in the matter, professor. I was ill. One does the best one can under the circumstances.’ She looked into her lap, her coffee untouched.
Doc suddenly seemed to realise that he had gone too far. ‘Forgive me, madame’. He leaned forward. ‘It is not said to make you angry. Your son is a gifted child. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. I only pray it is music. Today I have come to ask you, please madame, let me teach him?’ He had spoken to my mother softly and with great charm and I could feel her relax as his voice stroked her ego.
‘Humpf! I must say you seem to know more about him than his mother. I can’t see how he is any different to any other child of his age,’ she said huffily, though I could tell this was just a pretence and that she was secretly pleased by the compliment. My mother was a proud woman and didn’t expect charity from anyone. ‘It is out of the question. Piano lessons don’t grow on trees, professor.’
‘Ja, that is true. But, I think, maybe on cactus plants.’ Doc’s deep blue eyes showed his amusement. ‘For two years I have searched for the Aloe microsfigma, from here, zere, everywhere. Then, poof! Just by sitting on a rock. Aloe microsfigma comes. The boy is a genius. Absoloodle!’
‘What ever can you be talking about, professor? What have you two been up to?’ Whereas before she had been angry, now she was plainly charmed by him.
‘Madame, we met on the mountain top with only the face of God above us, the picture will capture the moment forever,’ he shrugged his scrawny shoulders. ‘It was destiny, the new cactus man has come.’
My mother seemed unsure how to take this. ‘I am a born-again Christian, professor, God’s name is only used in praise in this house,’ she said, mostly to cover her confusion but also as a caution to Doc not to assume an over-familiar manner with the Almighty.
‘God and I have no quarrels, madame. The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. Let me tell you how. It has humility but it is not submissive. It grows where no other plant will grow. It does not complain when the sun bakes its back, or the wind tears it from the cliff or drowns it in the dry sand of the desert or when it is thirsty. When the rains come it stores water for the hard times to come. In good times and in bad it will still flower. It protects itself against danger, but it harms no other plant. It adapts perfectly to almost any environment. It has patience and enjoys solitude. In Mexico there is a cactus that flowers only once every hundred years and at night. This is saintliness of an extraordinary kind, would you not agree? The cactus has properties that heal the wounds of men and from it come potions that can make man touch the face of God or stare into the mouth of hell. It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.’ He paused and pointed to the little green plant in the jam tin. ‘Kalanchoe thyrsiflora, such a shy little lady. Two years I search to find her, now she grows happily in my cactus garden where her big ears listen to all the gossip.’
‘I’m sure that’s all very nice, professor, but what does it all mean?’ my mother said. I could see she was confused, not knowing whether, in the end, Doc had praised or blasphemed God.
‘My eyes are not so goot. If the boy will come with me to collect cactus specimens, I will teach him music. It is a fine plan, ja? Cactus for Mozart!’
My mother looked pleased, as though a new thought had come into her head. ‘His grandmother was very creative, an artist you know. But I don’t know if there were any musicians in the family, perhaps Dad will know.’ She pointed to the two rose pictures on either side of the bookcase. ‘Her work,’ she said modestly, ‘she only ever painted roses.’
Doc did not turn to look at the pictures. ‘When I came in I saw them already, very goot.’
The idea of a musician in the family was clearly to my mother’s liking. The Boers are a naturally musical people and any excuse for a gathering brought out the concertinas and guitars and even an occasional violin. In my mother’s eyes it was their sole redeeming feature. The idea of a son who played the piano, let alone classical music, was a social triumph of the sort she had never expected to come her way. Even in this largely English-speaking town, a classical piano player in the family was a social equaliser almost as good as money.
I was to learn that the Apostolic Faith Mission, who believed in being born again, baptism by immersion, the gift of speaking in tongues and faith healing, was deemed pretty low on the social scale. Barberton was not the sort of town which encouraged the crying out in prayer or sudden spontaneous religious combustion from the floor of a charismatic church. My mother was constantly fighting the need to remain loyal to the Lord and his religiously garrulous congregation while at the same time aspiring to the ranks of ‘nice people’.
Old Pisskop at the piano promised to be the major instrument in balancing the family social scales. The bargain was struck just as Mrs Cameron arrived for her fitting. In return for trekking around the hills as Doc’s constant companion, I would receive free piano lessons. I had to work very hard on my camouflage to contain my delight. While I had no concept of what it meant to be musical, from the very beginning pitch and harmony had been a part of my life with Nanny.
The long summer months were spent mostly with Doc, climbing the hills around Barberton. Often we would venture into the dark kloofs where the hills formed the deep creases at the start of the true mountains. These green, moist gullies of treefern and tall old yellow wood trees, the branches draped with beard lichen and the vines of wild grape, made a cool, dark contrast to the barren, sun-baked hills of aloe, thorn scrub, rock and coarse grass.
Occasionally, we saw a lone ironwood tree rising magnificently above the canopy. These relics had escaped the axes of the miners who had roamed these hills fifty years before in search of gold. The mountains were dotted with shafts sunk into the hills and mountainside, dark pits and passages supported by timber, which before it was consigned to the tunnels, may have stood for a thousand years.
Doc taught me the names of the flowering plants. The sugarbush with its splashy white blossoms. A patch of brilliant orange-red seen in the distance usually meant wild pomegranate. I learned to differentiate between species of tree fuchsia, to stop and crush the leaves of the camphor bush and breathe its beautiful aromatic smell. I recognised the pale yellow blossoms of wild gardenia and the blooms of the water alder. Monkey rope strung from tall trees draped with club moss was given names such as: traveller’s joy, lemon capers, climbing saffron, milk rope and David’s roots. Nothing escaped Doc’s curiosity and he taught me the priceless lesson of identification. Soon trees and leaves, bush, vine and lichen began to assemble in my mind in a schematic order as he explained the nature of the ecosystems of bush and kloof and high mountain.
‘Everything fits, Peekay. Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. One thing follows the other, everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest. See,’ he would say, pointing to a tiny vine curled around a sapling, ‘that is a stinkwood sapling which can grow thirty metres, but the vine will win and the tree will be choked to death long before it will ever see the sky.’
He would often use an analogy from nature. ‘Ja, Peekay, always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty metres through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.’ He looked at me and continued, ‘The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking; most people you encounter will be vines, when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.’ His piercing blue eyes looked into mine. ‘Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you will grow stronger. If you are right you have taken another step towards a fulfilling life.’ He would sigh and squint at me. ‘Experts, what did I tell you about experts, Peekay?’
‘You can’t always go by expert opinion. A chicken, if you ask a chicken, should be stuffed with grasshoppers, mealies and worms.’ Even after repeating it a hundred times I still thought it was funny.
Or Doc would show me how a small lick of water trickling from a rock face would, drop by drop, gather round its wet apron fern and then scrub and later trees and vines until the kloof became an interdependent network of plant, insect, bird and animal life. ‘Always you should go to the source, to the face of the rock, to the beginning. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny. Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body. This has made him greater than the creatures around him. Everything has happened before, if you know what comes before then you know what happens now. Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library, use it to tell you where to look and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.’
Doc never talked down. Much of what he said would take me years to understand, but I soaked it up nevertheless, storing it in my awkward young mind where it could mature and later come back to me. He taught me to read for meaning and information, to make margin notes and to follow these up with trips to the Barberton library where Mrs Boxall would give a great sigh when the two of us walked in. ‘Here come the messpots!’ She claimed she had to spend hours erasing the pencilled margin notes in the books we borrowed. Doc once insisted they made the books more valuable and Mrs Boxall arched an eyebrow, ‘Written in German and in Kindergarten, Professor?’
Doc shrugged, looking up from his book and removing his gold-rimmed reading glasses. ‘Kindergarten, that also is written in German, Madame Boxall.’
But I don’t think Mrs Boxall really minded. The books on birds and insects and plants were seldom borrowed by anyone else and besides, as most of the books in the natural history section had once belonged to him, Doc adopted a proprietorial attitude towards the town library. Over the years his tiny cottage had become too small to contain them all and they had been bequeathed to the library which now acted, in Doc’s mind anyway, as a bibliographical outpost to his cottage. Doc also taught me Latin roots so I was no longer forced to resort to memory alone and the botanical names of plants began to make sense to me.
We climbed to the high kranses and the crags in search of cactus and succulents. Towards the end of summer, on the side of a mountain scarred by loose grey shale and tufts of coarse brown grass I stumbled on Aloe brevifolia, a tiny thorny aloe.
Doc was overjoyed. ‘Gold! Absolute gold!’ He jumped into the air and, upon landing, missed his footing on the shaly surface and fell arse over tip down the mountain, coming to a halt just short of a two-hundred-foot drop. He climbed gingerly back, hands bleeding from clutching at the sharp shale, a sheepish grin on his weather-beaten face. But the triumph of the rare find still showed in his excited eyes. ‘Brevifolia in these parts, so high, impossible! You are a genius, Peekay. Absoloodle!’
It was the find of the summer and, to Doc, worth all the weary hours spent on the hills and in the mountains. We recorded the find with the camera and removed six of the tiny plants, leaving double that number clinging precariously to the inhospitable mountainside.
Like me, Doc was an early riser, so just after dawn all that summer he gave me piano lessons. ‘In one year we will tell, but it is not so important. To love music is everything. First I will teach you to love music, after this slowly we shall learn to play.’
I was anxious to please Doc and worked hard, but I suspect he knew almost from the outset that I wouldn’t prove an especially gifted musician. My progress, while superior to that of the small girls he was obliged to teach for a living, indicated a very modest talent. In the years that followed, it was enough to fool my mother and all the big-bosomed matriarchs who ruled the town’s important families. At concerts which, I hasten to add, were not in my honour, I represented the cultured element and they would applaud me deliberately and loudly.
These occasions, which occurred in the spring and autumn, made my mother very proud, though they also represented a compromise with the Lord. Concerts were the devil’s work and very much against the Lord’s teaching. They were just the sort of thing which, like money-lending, the Lord had clearly condemned when he castigated the Pharisees and Saducees in the temple of Jerusalem. She justified my participation and her attendance by pointing out, to herself mostly, that many of the great classical musicians wrote music for the church.
The Lord’s will was equally explicit on drinking and smoking, the bioscope and dancing, except ballet. Ballet was another of the items cherished by the lavender-scented ladies from the town’s upper-echelon families, and the ballet performance usually preceded my piano recital. Together they made up the cultural component of the twice-yearly concert. Chopin, by yours truly, and Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Swans by gramophone record, danced to by six-year-old neophytes in white tutus and duckbilled headdresses made of papier mâché.
We were the cultural meat in a popular sandwich otherwise liberally filled with amateur vaudeville acts, solo songs of an Irish nature, single or combined concertina, piano accordion and guitar renditions of well-known Afrikaans folk songs usually performed by the Afrikaner warders from the prison. To redress the racial balance, a Gilbert and Sullivan male quartet would generally follow. One English comic opera song was reckoned by the concert committee to equate roughly with a dozen Afrikaans folk songs no matter how pleasingly syncopated, harmonised, toe tappin’ and hand clappin’ they might prove to be.
The concert would always end with the All Saints Anglican church choir singing ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ with the audience joining in. To show the Rooinek majority where their unspoken loyalty lay the warders and their families would leave the town hall prior to the mass rendition of ‘White Cliffs’. This would be accompanied by some booing and catcalls from less well-bred members of the remaining audience.
Germany had covertly helped the Boers during the Boer War. Apart from arms and ammunition sold for profit, she had donated food and medical supplies and had even sent medical orderlies and doctors to the harassed Boers who, due to the British scorched earth policy, were dying less from the aim of the British Lee-Metfords than from a land which could no longer feed them. To the Boers, Germany was an old and trusted friend in a country where a contract was a handshake and declared friendship a bond that continued beyond the grave. Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Reformed Church, where Jews were thought of as Christ-killers, had always existed and the concept of the superiority of some races over others was never for one moment in doubt. In this context, to many Boers Adolf Hitler was only doing his job and, to some minds, doing it damn well.
After the warders and other Nazi-sympathisers had walked out the remainder of the audience would stand up, lock arms and sing ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ at least twice to confirm doubly their love for a Britain facing her darkest hour. To bring the concert to a tearful close the concert party, with warders and other Afrikaners missing, would gather on the stage, each of us holding a long-stemmed rose delivered earlier by me as a sign of our family’s inherent good breeding. With the misty-eyed audience fresh from the mawkishly sentimental journey to a country most of us would never see, we stood to rigid attention while a scratchy 78 r.p.m. rendered ‘God Save the King’. Whereupon the cast hurled the long-stemmed roses into the audience.
My granpa, my mother and I then walked home, having politely refused the Mayor’s invitation to the traditional post-concert party for the cast at the Phoenix Hotel. Worldly parties typified by one such as this, where drinking, smoking and dancing took place, were pretty high up on the Lord’s banned list.
The next issue of the Goldfields News would report the concert with the warder walkout splashed across the front page. Tongues wagged for days. Important people suggested the military be brought in to wipe out this nest of Nazi vipers or that the prison be moved to Nelspruit, an Afrikaans town forty miles away, where most of the prisoners probably came from in the first place.
My granpa, with his experience in fighting the Boers, had once been canvassed for his opinion by Mr Hankin, the editor of the Goldfields News. But they didn’t print what he said. What he said was: ‘I spent most of the Boer War shitting my breeches as a stretcher bearer. The only thing those buggers do better than music is shoot. Without them the concert wouldn’t be worth a cardboard boot.’
Maybe Mr Hankin thought his newspaper gave the family enough publicity, because he never again asked my granpa for his opinion on anything, even though the prison warders did the same thing at every concert for the duration of the war. Mrs Boxall, who was the town’s correspondent on matters cultural, could always be relied on to devote most of her column, ‘Clippings from a Cultured Garden by Fiona Boxall’, to my performance. For days after it appeared my mother was in a state of dazed euphoria and I was conscripted to deliver a bunch of roses to the library twice a week for a month.
In the process of keeping faith with my mother, Doc instilled in me an abiding love for music. What my clumsy hands could never play I could hear quite clearly in my head. A love of music was, among his many gifts to me, perhaps the most important of them all, and he continued to teach me even after his calm and gentle life was thrown into turmoil, and the joy of being alone with him on the high cliffs and kranses was stolen from my childhood.