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 all, she’s an old family friend. Ma calls her DorisFisher. She’s ‘Miss Fisher’ to all the other girls, but I call her ‘Doris’ – and so does my younger sister when she eventually joins our class – for all the years that we remain her loyal students.
When Doris Fisher announces that she requires a pianist to accompany our lessons, Mrs May volunteers her services. So Kathleen and I meet for the first time in Doris Fisher’s tap and ballet class. Kathleen’s mother sits bolt upright on the edge of a high-backed wooden chair, banging out in hectic syncopation Harry M Woods’ Side by Side and Vincent Rose’s Whispering on the battered piano. She pounds so hard on it that the piano starts inching away across the wooden floorboards, leaving her to pull and thump her chair behind it in hot pursuit. Doris Fisher fixes us with a steely glare greatly at odds with her fairy-like appearance.
At the end of each lesson, Doris thanks Mrs May, and sympathises with her over the abject state of the piano. Kathleen and I swing our clacking tap shoes in each hand and walk outside to sit in the sun. Her mother remains undeterred by her weekly performances, but Kathleen is mortified.
‘Ag, don’t worry, man. Those other girls are just jealous – their mothers can’t even play the piano. Anyway, you also laughed …’
Kathleen hangs her head. Her cheeks are red. I can see tears caught in her pale lashes.
‘I know I did. It’s just all so embarrassing. I hate it when everyone laughs at her. I feel so bad for her. And I feel awful because I’ve laughed at her too. I mean, I love her – she’s my mum.’
The Pink Toffee
My Sub B teacher, Miss Potgieter, has her favourite pupils and, unless she happens to owe Pa lots of money on her chemist account, I’m not one of them. Now we’re in Sub B, we’ve already learnt to count up to one hundred and, when my best friend Gerda hears she’s come first in our class, she brags that means she’s the cleverest of us all. I don’t know why she thinks so, because we all know that bigger numbers mean more, and more’s always better. I’m sure you have to be much cleverer to come tenth in class – like me – than first.
We sit at our wooden desks drawing wavy patterns so we can learn how to do real writing. Tongue tips poke through pursed mouths, punctuating the slow squares of time in our school day. Miss Potgieter shouts:
‘You! Stop writing with your left hand! Only stupid children write with their left hand! Do it again!’
If we’re good, we’re rewarded with short break, followed by lunch break, and then home time, hallelujah! (Miss Potgieter says in the Bible that means you’re very happy.)
I wish I could be class captain … I’d be so well behaved if only Miss Potgieter would choose me. Miss Potgieter owes Pa money, but not that much. She only permits her favourites to help her gather our exercise books after our lessons. She takes our books home to mark with her stern red pen, or to decorate with gold or silver stars. I quite like the coloured stars, but Ma says she only wants to see gold stars in my books.