Whitethorn (35 page)

The day after I'd posted my letter to Miss Phillips, Meneer Van Niekerk, who I now knew went to teachers' college when his little
boetie
Sergeant Van Niekerk couldn't go because there was no money, sent for me.

‘Come in, Tom,' he called in English when I knocked on his open door. He pointed to the chair in front of his desk. ‘Sit down, son.' It was the same chair that was always there, but now I could sit on it and my feet were flat on the floor even if I leaned back. I still didn't like sitting in front of such a high-up person, but we did it quite a lot because Miss Phillips sent her envelopes to Meneer Van Niekerk to give to me, and he'd always have a chat with me and ask how I was going and I had to answer him in English.

‘I am very sorry to hear about the fire, the burning of your books,' he began, then paused and seemed to be thinking for a long time, with the end of one of the arms of his spectacles stuck in the corner of his mouth. ‘There is still a lot of ignorance and bigotry in this world and the Afrikaner
volk
are not without their share. Even a
Dominee
is not always wise in what he says, and words are sometimes put into God's mouth that are not always the absolute truth. I must tell you that I was also at that sermon and was very ashamed at what the
Dominee
told the congregation. Evil can be and is written in books from time to time, but we must read each book and decide for ourselves. Reading is a way of opening minds and burning books is about closing minds. The Bible says, “Seek the truth and it will set you free”. Reading books from everywhere and about everything is seeking the truth, and it will free you from bigotry and those ignorant men who would otherwise take advantage of your ignorance. Some of the greatest books ever written are in the English language, but also in German, French, Russian and so on, no nation owns a greater share of genius or stupidity. Do you understand?'

‘
Ja,
Meneer. Yes, Sir,' I hastily corrected myself.

The headmaster was saying the same thing as Doctor Van Heerden, only in a different way. He reached out and picked up a piece of paper and I saw it was the list of books I'd given to Sergeant Van Niekerk.

‘I have called the CNA in Pietersburg and ordered all these books. When they arrive we will keep them here at the school, but they will be yours, not government property. They will belong to you, Tom, you understand? You can take any one of them back to The Boys Farm whenever you like, but you will always know the others are safe.'

Talk about surprise! ‘Thank you, Sir,' I said. It didn't seem enough to say but I couldn't think of anything else. So I just said it again. ‘Thank you, Sir.'

‘Do you have a locker where you can keep one book safe, Tom?'

‘We can keep four things under our bed, Sir. They are safe there because we got an agreement that you can't steal from anyone in your own dormitory.' I was having difficulty believing I was going to get all my books back. It was the best news you could get except for one thing – I'd already sent the letter to Miss Phillips. If only I could have waited one more day she would never have known about the fire. Sometimes in life a person should wait for things to cool down a bit.

In case you don't know, the CNA is short for Central News Agency. I knew this because on the bottom right-hand corner on the inside of the back cover of some of my books there was this little piece of white paper about the size of a postage stamp, and on it was written:

CNA
Central News Agency
1217 Eloff St, Jhb.Tvl.
Books & Stationery
Suppliers Nationwide

‘Under your bed, that's good. Have you got anything else there?'

‘Yes, Sir, an old tennis ball I found that I throw for Tinker and she brings it back, and a broken alarm clock that doesn't work anymore.' I didn't tell him that Sergeant Van Niekerk had given me the old alarm clock in Mattress's hut after he'd taken his fingerprints off it. I liked it a lot. This was because it reminded me of Mattress as well as his son, Joe Louis. Also his wife who only wanted goats when he only wanted cows so he could sit under a nice shady tree and drink
kaffir
beer all day.

‘So, if you take a book back with you, there's room for one more thing?' the headmaster asked. I nodded, and from under his desk he produced this huge book, bigger even than the red book. ‘It's not new as I've had it a long time, but now it's yours, Tom.' He placed the big black leather book on the desk in front of me. On the cover it said
The Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary
.

I was too dumbfounded to speak, not only because it was a wonderful gift but also because a high-up person like Meneer Van Niekerk would even think about doing such a thing for someone who was only nine, nearly ten, who was owned by the Government. One other thing is for sure, if this was the shorter Oxford Dictionary, then I'd hate to see the longer one!

Later, after I'd left his office, I opened the front cover and on the inside in neat copperplate handwriting Meneer Van Niekerk had written:

For Tom Fitzsaxby
‘The truth shall set you free.'
de Wet van Niekerk

Duiwelskrans 1943

I thought you would like to know the names of the books that were burned so I've written them all down for you. I had to do it anyway because Sergeant Van Niekerk wanted them and so did the headmaster. I'm not sure why but Sergeant Van Niekerk said it was part of his police investigation and Meneer Van Niekerk, who knows? There were only fifteen English books in the school library and fifty-one in Afrikaans, and I'd read all the English ones and twenty of the Afrikaans. Anyway, here is the list I wrote out three times, the last time in case some day you may want to buy some
really
good books for your children and you're not sure which are the best.

Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales
Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne
Christopher Robin's Storybook by AA Milne
A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis
Stevenson
Aesop's Fables
The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear
Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman
Reynard the Fox by John Masefield
A collection of poetry, limericks, ballads, riddles in
rhyme
and nonsense verse

Then, when I got a bit older, from around about eight years on, this is what Miss Phillips sent to me.

Peter Pan by JM Barrie
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Then from there to right up to the time the books were burned, when I was reading very fast and couldn't get enough stuff to read and even Gawie's shit squares couldn't keep up.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling
Just William by Richmal Crompton
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Robin Hood by J Walker McSpadden
The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

These were a bit harder but I liked them a lot.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
White Fang by Jack London
Jock of the Bushveld by Percy Fitzpatrick
Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes
The Story of an African Farm by Olive Shchreiner
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules
Verne
King Solomon's Mines by Henry Rider Haggard
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Missionary Travels and Researches in Africa
by David Livingstone

I can tell you, that is a lot of reading that got burned. Thousands and thousands of words just disappeared into thin smoke. But when Miss Phillips wrote back to me she said, ‘Don't think of your books as gone, they are quite safe now because they are in your head forever.' To my surprise she wasn't angry with me at all. She also said she was sorry for the boys who burned them because they had been made to believe that they were doing God's work. She said it was nothing of the sort and what they'd done was an iniquity. Others, who should know better, were to be blamed and she wished this war would jolly well hurry up and be over so that we could all start working together and forget the hatred of the past and be one nation. Then she said something strange, ‘Were the paraffin tins there because they poured paraffin on the flames to get the fire started?'

So I looked up iniquity in my
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
It means, 1
wickedness; unrighteousness
. 2
gross injustice
.

Words can be very clever if they want and can sometimes save you a lot of time, so it's definitely worth knowing some.

Now, I don't want to get back to the
Dominee
because I now had two high-up warnings about him and another half of a one from Sergeant Van Niekerk, who didn't say anything about the preacher but just sighed and shook his head, and I could see he was glad he was writing up charges on a Sunday morning about
kaffirs
stabbing each other in the Location so didn't have to be in church. But this sermon was about Elijah and the burning bush. Now maybe you don't read the Bible, so you don't know the story, so I'd better tell you because it happened a long time ago. There was this prophet in the Old Testament called Elijah, and his people called the Israelites who decided he was no good. So he took them into the wilderness and said, ‘See that bush?' And the people said, ‘Yeah, okay?' Then Elijah showed them both hands so they could see he didn't have any matches. He said, ‘Search me if you like,' because in the olden days prophets wore sort of long dresses. Then still standing a long way away from the bush he shouted, ‘Abracadabra!' in the Israelite language and suddenly the bush is burning and he's not even close. ‘God is in that bush! Beware, oh ye of little faith!' he shouted at the multitudes. ‘From now on, have some respect!'

Well, that's what the
Dominee
said in church the very next Sunday after the fire. But he said, ‘Last Saturday at The Boys Farm there was another burning bush incident that just goes to show God's gospel is alive among the
volk.
Some English books were hidden under a great rock and, all of a sudden, there was a fire that destroyed them. Now I'm not trying to say this is a miracle because it isn't. But just like Joseph Goebbels could find an evil book in a whole library, some boys, who are present in this congregation and about whom Jesus said, “Suffer little children to come unto me”, found these devil books buried under a big rock and burned them. You see, even in this modern age, when we have aeroplanes that can fly around the world, the God of Elijah the prophet and the God of small children and the God of the Afrikaner
volk
is not mocked. The miracle of the burning bush is still here for all of us to learn to obey God's word!'

During all of this, the beetle had practically chewed up all the beard grass and you should have seen his ears. Talk about red! Sitting right in the front row with all the high-ups was Meneer Van Niekerk. All of a sudden he stood up and turned to the congregation. ‘This is a disgrace!' he shouted. Then he turned back to the
Dominee.
‘This God you talk about is not
my
God! The fire that destroyed a young boy's precious book collection was deliberately lit by someone who is ignorant enough to have listened to your wicked propaganda sermon! I blame this crime on you,
Dominee
!' Then he turned and walked out and his wife, Mevrou Van Niekerk, got up and followed him. I wished I'd had the courage to walk out, but I didn't. When he'd almost reached the church door at the back, the
Dominee
shouted, ‘I will carry this crime with pride in Jesus' precious name, Brother Van Niekerk!'

But then something even worse happened. Meneer Prinsloo stood up and turned to the congregation and said, ‘As God is my witness, and as the Government-appointed supervisor of The Boys Farm for twelve years already, let me tell you, what the
Dominee
said is God's truth!' And then some of the congregation clapped. So you can see, Gawie had no chance of being a
regte Boer
ever again. He was sitting in the row in front of me and someone said in a loud whisper, ‘
Surrogaat
!'

It was an all-over bad time. Gawie not being my friend any more was one bad thing. But what was another almost as bad was that there were no more shit-paper reports coming my way. It turned into 1944 and I was now ten, nearly eleven, and I didn't know what was going on in the war. Except you could tell England was winning because people didn't brag how good the Germans were any more. You practically never heard Adolf Hitler's name mentioned and, at long last, Adolf Hitler, the rooster, was ready for the Rand Easter Show. I've got to admit, he was even better than Piet Retief, his tail feathers were black as coal with blue and purple and green showing through and shiny as anything, and reaching up and touching the sky, and his new name for going into the show was Winston Churchill.And then a big thing in my life happened.

Dear Tom,

I have entered your name in the Bishop's College Scholarship.
This is a private Anglican school in Johannesburg and considered
the most prestigious in the Transvaal. The application says that last
year 2000 candidates sat the examination for only three places. The
suggestion is that this year there will be even more. It is for a boarder
at St John's House with all fees paid.