Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free Page A

department at the university in Durban, he has to go on ahead for the first day of term, so it’s just the three of them that take the train together the day after the girls’ mum has finally finished the packing. Dinah’s mum has found a home for the family’s cat, but not for the last two of her kittens, so, on the night before they leave, she sneaks out after dark without telling the girls and she pushes the kittens through the fence of the nearby Cecil Rhodes Estate. She’s always liked the gardens there and she hopes that the kittens will dig in and manage to have nice lives.
    The Rhodes Estate is called Groote Schuur which means Big Barn. It’s got a small pride of lions that Lisa and Dina can sometimes hear roaring at night. Cecil Rhodes was once the Prime Minister of the Cape, but now he’s forty years dead. There’s a bronze statue of him in The Gardens in Cape Town, pointing heroically towards the north. This is because, as well as owning twenty-nine Cape wine farms and most of the Transvaal goldfields, he also owns lots of Rhodesia in the north, because Queen Victoria has given him rights to rule all the territory there – that’s any territory where his mining ventures are venturing. Cecil Rhodes is famous for the Glen Grey Act which is designed to create extra land shortage among blacks, because having land has always made black people far too idle to go and work for whites. And, until now it’s been only white farmers who’ve wanted cheap black labour. Now Rhodes and his friends are needing far more of it, because mining has become the big thing. Cecil Rhodes is a man of vision. He believes in making money for Empire and in white boys havingadventures. He’s got his own sort of personal boy-scout pack, but it’s made up of boys who are grown-ups. Dinah knows that Cecil Rhodes is famous because he wanted to build a railway line all the way from Cape to Cairo. Everyone knows that this is a very inspiring idea, because it’s not only ambitious, but it’s alliterative as well.
    The train journey to Durban takes days and days, so the girls settle in happily to seventy-two hours of cutting out paper dolls with breaks for eating ham-and-pea soup from thick china plates in the dining car. Outside, the telegraph poles dip and rise in the wide landscape. The waiters enchant Dinah by their virtuoso method of dispensing tea and coffee. Holding nickel-plated coffee pot and milk jug, one in each hand, they pour two streams from a great height, swaying with the train’s motion as they do so. It’s a wonder to her how they always get the coffee and the milk to reach the top of the cup at exactly the same time. Their mum merely comments that the coffee is
Dreck
. She shakes her head and grimaces.
‘Schrecklich
’ she says.
‘Schrecklich
.’ All the waiters are white Afrikaners and all the bedding ‘boys’ are Cape Coloured.
    The original pale-brown people of the Cape had called themselves the Khoi, but the Dutch settlers called them Hottentots. The early Dutch had made so bold as to land, because the Portuguese had recently proved to them that the seas around the Cape didn’t boil. So the Khoi lost all their territory to the Dutch and were turned into landless labourers. They also lost their language. That’s except for those peculiar clicks that got taken over by the Xhosa. Finally the Khoi stopped being the Khoi and became the Cape Coloured people. They’d got mixed up with the whites and their slaves – slaves who had come from everywhere – from Guinea, Angola and Madagascar; from India, Java and China. But the top-notch slaves were always the Malays and they built the old Dorp Street Mosque. So if a Cape Coloured person says to you that his daughter looks like a Muslim, what he means is that she’s got straight hair, which is a top-notch thing to have. Plus his daughter’s probably also got those