Frankie and Stankie
For my father
Contents
Introduction Joanna Briscoe
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Terminology
About the Book
About the Author
For Discussion
Suggested Further Reading
Barbara Trapido’s Favourite Books
By the Same Author
Also available by Barbara Trapido
Introduction Joanna Briscoe
I was introduced to the work of Barbara Trapido when a newspaper asked me to write a feature about her novel Juggling. The commission involved travelling to Malvern where the novel is partially set, and as the train plunged through the tumble of green that leads to the station, I finished the last page with that particular combination of satisfaction and loss that stirs in the wake of a sublimely engrossing read. Entranced, I realised that I had found a new literary passion.
Here is a writer who can combine plot pyrotechnics and dazzling structural shifts with meditations on bereavement, terminal illness and skirt lengths; who can run Shakespearean themes beneath her own contemporary tales of romance and domestic drama, and who can write about AIDS, German song cycles and family abandonment with the addictive pull of a soap opera. This is her own brand of magic: for all her swooping and spinning, there is a darker consciousness at work, a morality and seriousness of intent, and her highly entertaining novels are ultimately suffused not only with literary and artistic allusion but with tragedy.
This Trapido balancing act is put to its finest use in Frankie & Stankie, in which a period of breathtaking atrocity is seen through the eyes of a child. I remember being confused by the first chapters, impatiently waiting for the trademark plot twists and intrigues to begin before understanding that this sixth novel covers different territory altogether. Frankie & Stankie needs to be read primarily as a memoir, as a very thinly disguised autobiography that deals with growing up in 1950s South Africa as the system descends from ‘imperial-racist to criminal lunatic’.
For a white author to write about South African politics at all is a risky enterprise, and Trapido’s brilliantly daring achievement is to present the daily horrors of apartheid in the voice of a young girl. As the daughter of liberals, her protagonist Dinah, both indoctrinated and dissenting, combines the classic child’s acceptance of the status quo with a sense of its absurdity. The out and out insanity of the period’s laws and mores is reported with intentional detachment, the unadorned tone of the narrative forcefully driving the tragedy home. As a reader, you never forget the descriptions of ‘native girls’, of caged bushmen in a show, of racial classification techniques: if a pencil falls through the hair, a child is deemed white. As an English reader, I found Frankie & Stankie illuminated this slice of history for me more effectively than any newspaper had done.
The novel contains a fascinating mixture of the familiar and the alien: thumping colonial traditions are upheld in this land of monkeys and lychee trees; Union Jacks are raised against a backdrop of banana palms. It’s a work stuffed full of delicious observation: if God is in the detail, there’s heaven to be sampled here. As the novel progresses, the exhilaration of Dinah’s developing political consciousness and first experiences of love bring the reader back to the world of Trapido’s earlier fiction, in which personal epiphany and transcendent love somehow establish a basic philanthropy alongside the darkness.
Dinah is a character to rival Trapido’s best fictional creations: she has a ferocious brain on her, absorbs poetry by heart, is given to deliciously cutting verbal interplay, and will dedicate several hours to literary criticism of Vogue. For those who know her, the young Dinah is instantly and pleasingly recognisable in the adult Trapido, whose combination of extraordinary warmth, eccentricity and a decidedly cool wardrobe render her ageless.
After I’d written my feature on Juggling, I received the first of many cards in large scrawled writing from Barbara Trapido. I bought her backlist, met her, and soon realised that she has a rare gift for friendship: the kind of friendship that includes that much treasured anachronism, proper long letters on thick paper. To me she is Babs Traps, a name she tolerantly puts up with, and I find I can coat my reverence with much joking irreverence.
In the summer I had cucumber sandwiches with her in an old parsonage in Oxford, where she delivered an impassioned speech about the Middle East and quoted yards of poetry, walked straight through a garden sprinkler without pausing because it was a hot day, then followed the meeting with a long letter expressing her worry that she had talked too much, and signed ‘with ten thousand kisses from Babs Traps’. This somehow sums her up.
One
Dinah knows that she’s weedy: she’s always been little and thin, and she has no meat on her bones. She has permanent black smudges under her eyes and, because she’s asthmatic, she breathes through her mouth, which is always open. This makes her look daffy as well as weedy. In addition, her parents tell her she’s edgy; zänkisch her mother calls it. There are various anecdotes about her early life that testify to this. Dinah is edgy because her mother is edgy during the pregnancy, and she’s born premature because her mother has got over-excited on the day. First of all she’s had a pleasant surprise because Dinah’s father has got a letter declaring him unfit to serve in the Dutch Army in the war against Hitler. This is because his eyesight is too bad, which ought not to have been a surprise, since he’s as good as blind without his glasses. Dinah’s dad is from Holland, though he’s been in Cape Town for nearly five years. That’s why it’s the Dutch Army that can decide whether or not to call him up. In the South African Army you can’t get called up. You have to be a volunteer. But there are lots and lots of volunteers, because some of the recruitment posters have been so snappy:
DON’T BE LEFT OUT OF THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME!
WAS THERE EVER A GIRL WHO DIDN’T PREFER A MAN IN UNIFORM?
Quite a few black men are volunteering as well but they’re not allowed to carry guns – though if you come from Basutoland you’ll be given a stout wooden stick. Or sometimes you’ll get an assegai. Meanwhile the women are saving on light bulbs and they’re knitting balaclavas for the troops.
Dinah’s mother has never learned to knit. And just a few hours before Dinah is born, she has a really nasty shock, because, while Dinah’s dad is out teaching one of his evening classes, a man, having first tried to break down the front door, has gone tramping round and round the garden of their ground-floor flat. He’s been shouting abuse at her in the darkness and he’s banged on the bedroom window.
‘Open up there, Dolly!’ he bawls. ‘Come on now, Dolly, for Christssake!’ Then he tramps around and bangs about some more. ‘Give us a kiss, now, that’s my girl,’ he bawls. ‘Let me in, you bitch! Wazza matter with you?’
Dinah’s mum thinks he must be the multiple rapist currently on the loose in Cape Town and, since she’s got no telephone in the flat, she takes a big risk in making a dash for the phone box, clutching Dinah’s elder sister to her bosom, while the rapist is busy trampling the arum lilies to death around the back. She dials the police, who come at once, only to discover a drunken Australian soldier asleep in one of the flowerbeds. His troopship’s docked in Cape Town for a few days and he’s been trying to make his way back to a woman who’s been very free with her favours on previous nights.
Right now there are lots of Australian soldiers docking in South African ports. And most of the local citizens think that the Aussies are really
wild. In Durban, way up the Indian Ocean coast, the local Vera Lynn has been offering up special renditions of ‘Waltzing Mathilda’ from the quay, which has the Australian soldiers rushing eagerly to the wharfside of their troop ships. This is because the singer in question is just like a great white whale. She can manage two hundred and fifty songs a day which she belts out through a megaphone and she’s always dressed in white. So she’s known as the Woman in White. Her real name is Perla Gibson.
Dinah is born later that night. It’s the night of the Australian soldier. She’s born in the lift during a wartime power cut because her mother can’t hold on any longer, even though the nurse tells her she’s got to.
‘You’ve got to hold on,’ the nurse says. ‘I’ve never done a birth before.’
The poor girl is a wartime stand-in. Next morning, the regular day-nurses all remember Dinah’s mother from her previous childbirth. They groan at the sight of the new baby, who weighs just a fraction over four pounds and looks exactly like a shrivelled yellow monkey because she has infant jaundice. But Dinah’s mum is quite taken with her baby’s yellow complexion and imagines it to have something to do with her husband’s Netherlandish family, who are all unknown to her – trapped as they are in occupied Holland – but she does know there’s a Dutch connection with Indonesia. She fancies that her baby’s looks are exotic. The same nurses saw Dinah’s older sister into the world fourteen months earlier and they right away called her Angel-face. Now, with a flash of originality, they call Dinah Tiny-mite.
‘Tiny-mite is going to give poor Angel-face a very hard time,’ they say.
Angel-face by this time is a healthy, smiley, auburn-haired cherub with four pearly incisors, two up, two down, who gurgles and bounces so charmingly from her cot on the balcony of the apartment that total strangers come by and bombard her with presents. They throw stuffed toys up on to the balcony for her and little jerseys they’ve knitted out of their scratchy wartime wool rations. What the nurses don’t know is that Tiny-mite is already giving Angel-face a hard time, because, once the waters have broken, Dinah’s dad has just leapt straight into the taxi along with his wife. He means to drop her off at the hospital and hurry back at once, so he’s left poor Angel-face sound asleep and all alone. And then, of course, he’s stuck in the lift. Plus, given that he’s a fairly recent immigrant and not yet all that au fait with English popular culture, he’s forgotten that it’s Bonfire Night, so when he gets back two hours later, Angel-face, who’s been woken by the neighbourhood rocket display, is standing at her cot bars in paroxysms of terror with her poor little face caked in snot and her beautiful gingernut curls all spiky with sweat.
Remember, remember
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
Treason and plot are uppermost right now, because pro-Nazi elements among the white population are stockpiling their ar senals of hand grenades and guns. Plus the government is anxiously gearing up for a possible Japanese invasion, now that Japan has entered the war on Germany’s side. General Smuts has just announced that all South Africans, black and white, must learn to pull together. Segregation measures will be relaxed, he says. That’s while the war’s on, anyway. Afterwards the segregation measures will all come back again. Meanwhile, a mad lady in the hospital foyer is telling Dinah’s dad that Scorpios will always have the rockiest journey through life. Unfortunately Dinah isn’t even meant to be a Scorpio, so maybe it’s no wonder she’s not all that well equipped to deal with its several astrological disadvantages.
Angel-face is called Lisa. Tiny-mite is supposed to have been called Amaryllis, after a song her dad sings while her mother accompanies him on a borrowed piano. Amarilli, mia bella. It’s in a collection of antique love songs that he’s got in a book from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Instead, Dinah’s dad changes his mind on the way to the registry office next day. He finds himself whistling a pop song that goes, ‘Dinah, is there anyone finer, in the state of Carolina?’ He likes to make decisions without consultation because it’s quicker that way and, anyway, he always knows best.
Dinah’s mum has the girls so close together because she doesn’t always know best. She’s been told that you don’t get pregnant while you’re breastfeeding and to her credit she’s been breastfeeding Angel-face for fourteen months on demand, since she hasn’t read Truby King, who has created a fashion for formulas and four-hourly regimentation. She does so even though Angel-face, who has a hearty appetite, frequently bites the nipple. In between feeds Angel-face even takes bites out of the bath soap, leaving behind little telltale semi-circles serrated by her teeth. Her favourite soap comes a dark, marbled green and it’s called Cuticura. Angel-face finds it irresistible.
Dinah is kept in a cardboard box at first and wiped down with olive oil because she’s too small to have proper baths. This is at a time when olive oil is still strictly medicinal. It’s well before Elizabeth David has brought the good news from Aix-en-Provence to the British Isles, courtesy of Penguin Books, and then all over the Empire including Cape Town. Angel-face goes stiff with terror when she first hears Tiny-mite’s unearthly mewling cry, and she won’t go near the cardboard box for days. For two years afterwards, she’s even afraid to approach lifelike dolls. Unlike Angel-face, Tiny-mite is not a good eater. She drops off at the nipple and will not suck.
‘We had to smack you to make you eat,’ her dad tells her in years to come.
He’s always been a ready smacker. Her dad is called Ta, which is a corruption of Da, though Dinah’s mum has diminutised this to Tächenherz because she comes from Berlin. His real name is Fred.
Dinah continues to be a non-eater throughout her childhood. When one of her dad’s colleagues visits with a packet of biscuits, he says they’re ‘for Lisa to eat and for Dinah to play with’. The biscuits are called Iced Zoological but the girls call them Animal Biscuits. Each biscuit is a scalloped rectangle with pastel icing on the top and an animal piped on to it in a contrasting colour. There are yellow giraffes on rose-pink icing and white tigers on sky-blue icing. Dinah loves to play with the biscuits. She’s always been good at playing, while Angel-face isn’t introspective enough to make up games. She likes visitors and outings and treats. Best of all she likes Toffo-lux. She hangs around saying, ‘I’m bored. I’ve got nothing to do. What can I do now? What’s there to eat? What’s for pudding?’ So, right from the time they’re about three and four, it’s Tiny-mite who thinks up all the games.
Sometimes she leads Angel-face into the garden shed, where families of daddy-long-legs live on the walls. If she touches their fragile, umbrella-spoke legs with her index finger they scurry up the walls so deftly that it leaves her feeling heady. She already loves to climb walls and trees herself but she knows she’ll never be able to climb like that on sheer vertical walls. For some reason Angel-face hates the creepy-crawlies, especially when they move. When Dinah makes them scurry up the walls she yells and screams in panic. This makes Dinah keep on doing it because, being so much smaller than her sister, it’s one way to redress the balance.
Mealtimes are hell for Dinah, when she clamps her mouth shut against the approaching spoon.
‘This one’s for Teddy,’ her dad will say. ‘This one’s for Panda. This one’s the last one. This one’s the very last one.’
She knows it will never be the last one until the bowl is empty. Sometimes he eats a spoonful himself to encourage her, and because, like Angel-face, he has a hearty appetite. Then, once she’s turned six, he always finishes up by saying, ‘This one’s for Co.’ Co is Dinah’s rag-doll that she’s had for her fifth birthday. Her name is really Ro. Ro is short for Rosema, which is not short for Rosemary. When grown-ups suggest it, Dinah says firmly, ‘No. Her name is Rosema. Just Rosema.’
Dinah only gets to know one real-life Rosemary, but this is only once she’s started school. Rosemary is a girl in the neighbourhood who has high status in the child community because she’s excessively blonde. Rosemary is white-mouse blonde
with a small whiffly nose and little see-through ears. Lots of the children are blonde-ish but not so blonde that the light shines right through them as it does with Rosemary. This whiteness is associated with purity. Rosemary’s dad is immensely rich, even though he can’t read and write. He is said to sign papers with an X.
This is an achievement that Dinah’s mum remarks upon, a little pointedly, from time to time, since the girls’ dad is not at all rich even though he can read and write in eight languages, having been rigorously taught between the wars in one of those gymnasiums they have in Holland for clever boys and girls. His best thing, along with teaching himself to play musical instruments, is maths. For a while he works as an actuary in a bank but he finds it boring so he now works for a pittance as an untenured junior lecturer in the maths department at the university in Cape Town. The girls’ mum calls his mathematical activities puzzling. She uses the word as if it was from the verb to puzzle.
‘Tächenherz is puzzling,’ she says.
It’s just one example from her range of Germanic verbal peculiarities.
The flat doesn’t have a lot of space and if he’s marking exam scripts at the only table then the girls’ dad has to clear them away at mealtimes. Dinah’s horror times. Sometimes, presumably to blot out the girls’ chatter going on in the same room, he’ll start to puzzle out loud. Angel-face and Dinah are amused by his mathematical gibberish and chant bits of it at each other.
‘Pi to the curve,’ they say. They say it as they take turns to climb on to a big wooden box called the Klappkasten and jump off. ‘Pi to the curve.’
Dinah envisages triangles of gooseberry pie with crimped edges, because there are gooseberries growing in the garden of the flats.
They do the same sometimes when their dad sings his Italian songs to their mother’s accompaniment. There’s one about a beautiful mouth: O bocca bella. O bocca, bocea bella. For years the girls think it’s about malted corn porridge because one of Lisa’s many culinary favourites is a chocolatey porridge called Maltabela which she likes to alternate in the mornings with Aunt Jemima’s Cream of Wheat. The song keeps repeating the phrase so they giggle and sing along in silly voices: ‘Oh Maltabela, oh Malta, Maltabela!’