Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [51]
The cooks are black, supervised by an old white lady who has spectacularly high hair and who sits in the cool room outside the kitchen drinking tea and reading books with pictures of ladies (whose boobs are about to pop out of their dresses) fainting into men’s arms on the covers.
The maids who do our laundry are black and are supervised by the senior girls’ matron, who is deaf and so tired she spends most of the day half asleep with the radio on in her sitting room. Her room smells of old lady and mothballs.
The boardinghouse we call a hostel, a massive redbrick colonial building that was an army barracks once. It sleeps two hundred children. Forty kids per dormitory, each with a footlocker in which we keep the set of clothes for the week; one set of school uniform and one set of play clothes to last seven days, new brookies and socks daily.
Milk of magnesia, administered by our hook-nosed matron every Friday, keeps us regular. Although the fish, also administered on Friday, usually takes care of any constipation we may have been suffering from.
We wash our hair on Saturday mornings and periodically we are doused with a scalp-stinging mixture that is supposed to kill lice.
The boys are punished with stripes—a leather strap, which hangs in the teachers’ common room. Afterward, we ask to see the pattern of welts on their bums and we ask if they cried and although their faces are streaked and we have heard their shouts of pain they shake their heads, no.
The girls are hardly ever beaten. For our punishments, we are made to kneel on a cement floor for half an hour. Or write out lines: “I will not talk after lights out. I will not talk after lights out,” four hundred times. Or memorize passages from the Bible: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.”
The two hundred boarders are mostly children from farms around Umtali, and the two hundred day scholars are townies and we despise and torture them, luring them up into the pine forest, where we attack them and steal their packed lunches. We are better athletes and worse students and tougher fighters than the day-bugs. It is rare that we allow a townie into the rarefied circle of friends and alliances and conspirators that makes up the boarders’ gang. But every morning we meet, in class lines, in the Assembly Hall to sing.
Morning has broken, like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
And a chosen senior kid reads from the Bible, mumbling nervous words. We pray for the army guys. We say the “Ah Father.” And then we go back to our classrooms and stand behind our desks and say another prayer, also for the army guys. Some of the kids, whose dads or brothers have been killed in the War, cry every morning. Their soft sobs are part of the praying.
There are not very many townies with dead dads and brothers. Most of the dead dads and brothers are farmers; killed on patrol, or in an ambush, or by a land mine, or during a farm attack.
On Wednesday before lunch we take Scripture Class from a teacher with hairy legs and sandals (which gives our regular teacher a break to go and smoke cigarettes and drink tea in the teachers’ lounge). On Saturday, another woman (also with hairy legs and sandals, so that I come to associate Christian women with these particular characteristics) comes to the boardinghouse from the Rhodesian Scripture Union and we have to sit in the prep room while the sun and the fields call to us from outside. She tells us Bible stories and makes us pray and hold hands and sing the kinds of songs which require clapping and hopping up and down. On Sunday we walk in snaking lines toward our various churches; Vanessa and I are Anglicans; my best friend is Presbyterian (“Press-button”). There are also Dutch Reformed, Catholics (“Cattle-ticks