laughs.
‘I can’t – you’ll fall off, sail into the air to the sun – I might never see you again!’
But the best thing in the playground is Dobbin. Dobbin is the name of the grey horse that rocks backwards and forwards. I like to ride behind his head and wavy wooden mane, chipped and flecked with lots of different layers of paint. Pa says I’ll get splinters if I try to peel them away. Dobbin’s even bigger and better to ride on than Marta, I think. But I’ll never tell her that because I love her, even when she won’t let me ride on her back. Dobbin’s got place for four children on his saddle. The place behind his head is mine. No one else is allowed to sit there. I close my eyes. Hold tight to the iron hoop reins.
‘Gallop fast, grey Dobbin! Gallop fast, great stallion!’ shouts Pa.
I’m going to fly over his head. Up into the sky and the wind.
Pa gives Dobbin sweets to eat. I try. He won’t open his mouth for me. Only Pa. When we leave the playground, I sulk all the way back to Granny Bobbeh’s house. Next time, I’m going to feed Dobbin first.
When we leave, Granny Bobbeh stands at the gate waving and waving goodbye. Blowing kisses into the wind. She runs along the pavement waving until we’re far away down the road, just a speck in the distance. Far away until we turn the corner and we’re gone.
Side by Side
Kathleen May is my English friend. She’s in the composite class at school where all the English-speaking children are crammed into the same classroom with their harried teacher, Mrs Harvey.
According to Ma, the composite class is for those children whose parents don’t care whether they learn the language of the Free State or not – or much of anything else, for that matter.
She says she’d just die if I were in that class. She’s prepared to overlook this terrible transgression on the part of Kathleen’s parents because they come from England. That makes them different, but in a good way.
Ma loves our Queen and everything English, but she says Afrikaans is the true language of the Free State, and everybody who lives here should be able to speak it ‘fluently’.
That means being able to speak it nice and smoothly, Ma says. She also says it’s a very important and beautiful language and that’s why I’m in the Afrikaans-medium class at school, so I can learn to speak and read and write it perfectly.
My friend Kathleen used to have a brother called Willie. He died when she was still a baby. Her two grown-up sisters live far away in England and Johannesburg. Now, on their chicken farm five miles out of town, in their corrugated-iron house surrounded by chicken wire clogged and patched for all its length with the down of thousands of plucked pullets, Kathleen is a lonely, only child. Pale and thin, big-footed and blue-eyed, her hair is the colour of baled hay. She looks like the painting of the water sprite in my Book of Fairy Tales.
Her father always wears khaki pants and shirts, and a battered old felt hat. His hat has protected the pale English skin on his forehead, and it looks completely different from his crimson cheeks and nose where the African sun has valiantly tried to stamp him as one of its own. He doesn’t talk very much, smiles when he sees me. Tips up the brim of his hat with his forefinger to say hello.
Ma likes Kathleen’s mother very much. Her name is Theodora. We only ever call her ‘Mrs May’.
‘How I envy Mrs May her peaches-and-cream complexion,’ Ma sighs into her dressing table mirror. She purses her mouth, emphasising its perfect cupid’s bow. Her eyes are critical behind her cat’s-eye spectacles.
Ma’s just right, I think. Not thin, not fat, her summer skin a smooth brown egg speckled with little freckles. Her black curls shine.
Mrs May makes all her own clothes. Her stiffly starched dresses stand out flat and stiff at her sides, like the downturned smile of a clown. Grey-haired and pink-cheeked, short and stout, Mrs May declares, ‘I’m-just-the-right-weight-for-my-height.’
‘She’s so eccentric …’ Ma says. She smiles. ‘So English!’
One day, Ma receives a letter informing her of a Miss Doris Fisher’s impending arrival and intention to start a school of dance in our town. Miss Fisher will drive one hundred miles from Bloemfontein – where she lives – to teach tap and ballet to children of all ages, and she sincerely hopes she will be able to impart her enthusiasm for her chosen craft. The idea of a tap and ballet studio in our midst causes a stir among mothers and daughters alike, and a queue of hopeful, mostly unremarkable students starts forming early on the day she’s due to arrive.
I’m introduced to her in the large room that used to house the woodworking class in the now-empty old primary school. The odour of boys’ sweat and sawdust still lingers in the air.
Doris Fisher is a vision in floating tulle; she’s wearing a leotard teamed with a skirt floating over petticoats of net, just like the pictures of English ballerinas Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Markova in Ma’s ballet book at home. Ma says Alicia Markova’s real name was Alice Marks; she changed it so her name would sound foreign and exotic, as a real prima ballerina’s name should.
At her waist, Doris Fisher has pinned a tiny bunch of velvet flowers. Tied together with narrow ribbons looped into shy bows, they glow like jewels. The next time I see her, a small bunch of glossy red cherries, framed by dark-green leaves, nestles in their place. Her flaming red hair is coiled in a bun in the nape of her neck and she’s standing with her feet in ballet’s first position, her right heel gently nudging her neat left instep. Her hands are folded demurely inside each other, her arms relaxed against her lap.
We’re the first to arrive. Ma introduces herself and, with her arm around my shoulders, pushes me forward.
‘This is my eldest daughter, Jennifer,’ she says. ‘She’s five years old and she’d love to join your class.’
I’m drinking in the vision of this shimmering fairy and I’m struck dumb.
Doris Fisher tells Ma she’s sure she remembers Pa from long ago, when they were young and still at school. Next to me, I feel Ma stiffen slightly. She looks intrigued.
‘I went to school in Bloemfontein,’ Doris Fisher continues. ‘Your husband went to Grey, didn’t he? Grey College? He was a great sportsman – all the girls in my class fancied him!’
Ma smiles. Her mouth is closed and her lips are very thin. Doris Fisher laughs.
‘Oh, but we all knew he had a girlfriend, you know. He was madly in love with her – none of us had a chance with him!’
Next to me, I hear Ma take a deep breath. I drag my eyes away from the beautiful Doris and look up at her. Ma doesn’t say anything, but she laughs quietly somewhere deep down in the back of her throat, and it seems to me as if a signal, a message with no words, is flickering through the air between them. Then Ma blinks her eyes and says she’ll be sure to ask Pa if he also remembers Doris Fisher from Bloemfontein, from those days long ago when they were still at school.
An introductory lesson is arranged for me for the following week. As we leave, the next mother and daughter step up to lay claim to what I’ve already decided is mine by proxy. Doris Fisher is so beautiful, if she and Pa were friends when they were young, I just know he’d never forget her. I decide to call her ‘Doris’. After
