Whitethorn Read Free

anything, sounding in my head like a stone shot from a catty striking a tin can.
    â€˜Ah, Ten-Kaa!’ Mattress said approvingly, splitting her name in half and softening it, because you can’t say hard sharp words in the Zulu language.
    With her name out of the way I became all business, names give an identity and now Tinker was definitely here to stay.
    â€˜Will she drink pig’s milk?’ I asked.
    â€˜Soon see, Kleinbaas .’ He swung his legs over the pigsty wall where a whole heap of grunting and sucking and squealing was going on. Pigs are not exactly silent types.
    â€˜Hey, look, Kleinbaas ,’ he laughed and pointed to Tinker. ‘Same like her.’ He said it in Zulu and what he meant was that the sow and piglets were black and white and so was Tinker. ‘The sow won’t know the difference.’
    She’d have to be pretty dumb, I thought to myself. Tinker was about a sixth of the size of the greedy piglets. It was obvious she stood no chance if she was going to have to compete for the sow’s milk.
    The enormous sow lay on her side in the muddy pigsty, her great belly heaving, flies buzzing around her eyes, flicking her ear to chase them away. Every few moments she’d give a deep grunt, but you couldn’t tell if it was because she was happy or was simply putting up with the squabbling going on down below. Looking at it from her point of view you had to wonder. Twelve piglets pushing each other aside to have a go, their snouts concertinaed right up into their foreheads. Each sucked like there was no tomorrow in an attempt to get as much scoff as they could before being bumped aside. It can’t have been all that comfortable for her. Pigs don’t muck about when it comes to food, that’s for sure. I suppose it was the same at the orphanage, if you didn’t cradle your plate within your arms and scoff it as fast as possible, the food on it soon disappeared into someone else’s mouth.
    I keep calling it ‘the orphanage’ and that sounds pathetic, as if it was in the olden times or something, whereas the time was 1939 with everyone saying there was going to be a war with the Germans. The English against the Germans and you can guess who wanted to fight for the Germans. More about that later. The real name for the place was ‘The Boys Farm’.
    It was in the country, about four miles out of a small town known as Willemskrans, which means the Williams Cliffs. This was because it was in the Lebombo Mountains and the town snuggled against a mountainside and was slap-bang up against these tall, rocky cliffs that rose nearly a thousand feet upwards. People said that the climate and the flora and fauna at the top were different to those at the bottom. I wondered how this could be. Mattress said that the people who lived up there were a different tribe. One big cliff and all of a sudden everything changes, the trees, flowers, climate and the people. Maybe Tinker came from up top and she’d come down the Letaba River. This was improbable because she’d have to have fallen down some mighty waterfalls. To do this and to be still alive would be some sort of a miracle, so I guess she came from some place not too high up, where the creek started.
    Anyway, The Boys Farm was on twenty acres with its own vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, ten milking cows and a small dairy for making butter, there were also two donkeys to pull the small hand plough used for tilling. There was talk of a secondhand tractor but it never came to anything. Lots of things never came to anything in that place. We all worked in the vegetable garden and the older boys chopped wood and milked the cows.
    What we did was usually considered kaffir work. But they decided that we’d all grow up to work on farms or as motor mechanics, timber cutters, lorry drivers or maybe get an apprenticeship to be a carpenter or boilermaker in the mines. We had to learn early to do things