White Man Crawling

Snowman

16 Snowman The night before our departure we had dinner with the Afrikaans teacher, Miss Devine. She was a seasoned traveller; she had some good tips for us. ‘Take long johns with you,’ she said, ‘and never accept a drink that has already been poured from the bottle. You never know what they might have laced it with.’ She exploited the feature of definiteness in the fricative ‘they’, held it for a longer period than usual between her tongue and her dentures. The pressure slightly dislodged the latter, producing a whistling sound as of kettles boiling. ‘More pumpkin, boys?’ We politely declined a third helping of the sweet orange pulp flavoured with nutmeg. We wanted to keep some space for dessert, Miss Devine’s speciality: pumpkin fritters rolled in sugar and cinnamon. The Afrikaans teacher was no pushover when it came to pumpkin recipes. Her jaundiced complexion was a result, not of an obstructed bile duct or of some liver disease like hepatitis, but of the regular consumption of enormous quantities of pumpkin. ‘How are your drinks? Let me banish the daylight from your glasses.’ This joke was not weakened by the fact that it was late in the evening, the crepuscular time when eros and thanatos merge in the imagery of light and shade… even though the Christmas beetles had not gone to bed, and at least one Heuglin’s robin was concurring with Miss Devine’s admonition to ‘take warm things...take warm things...take warm things...’. We gladly offered our glasses for a refill. There was no denying the potency of Miss Devine’s home-made peach brandy, which she called mampoer, and which gave her nose a reddish glow. This, combined with her cupreous cheeks, reminded many of her admiring pupils past and present of the warm end of the visible spectrum. ‘And another thing boys - if you ever get the urge to spend a penny out in the open, do it through a sock. Otherwise your dinguses [things] will snap off. I tell you, it’s going to be cold enough to freeze the brass off a bald monkey. Isn’t that how the English expression goes?’ We thought it did. ‘Dress warm boys; which reminds me; I’ve got something for you.’ She bustled off down the passage while we sipped away at the liquid lightning in our glasses; which was 17 reciprocated by a real bolt from the sky. It, briefly, restored the daylight Miss Devine had so hubristically banished. A stifling, prestorm lull was seeping into our necks and armpits. The Afrikaans teacher returned with gifts for each of us: body belts made from two of her old bras, and knitted tea cosies, brown and yellow for me, blue and red for my friend. Both sported green pompons, so large that they tilted to one side. We were to wear them on our heads, day and night because ‘As long as your head is warm, you will survive the bitter European winter. Janee - ’n warm kop, ’n warm dop, en julle sal deurkom.’ [yes no – a warm head, a warm shot, and you’ll make it] Our Rhodesian education had fully prepared us to sample the cultural delights of Europe: we wanted to get hold of as much pornography as possible and, in a more sentimental vein, we wanted to visit the real Kensington Gardens where our favourite literary character, Peter Pan, had been conceived. We dreamed of the Broad Walk, the Round Pond, rhododendrons, and the River Serpentine. But we dreamed even more of pussy, nay, we were obsessed by it. ‘So, what do you boys intend seeing while you are in Europe? I muttered something about the Popadopoulis, and my friend thought we might visit the Eiffel Flats. The seasoned traveller, Miss Devine, gently corrected us. She then went on to recommend Delville Wood in Belgium where two of her uncles had perished in the First World War, the Rhodesian Ridgeback Society in Vienna, and the statue of Jannie Smuts in London. Neither of us had experienced snow, except for the stuff you see in a deep freeze, which doesn’t really count; and the balls of cotton wool on our Christmas trees, which also doesn’t really count. There was, of course, no shortage of literary snow in our colonial education, driven, flurried, and flaked by conscientious expatriate teachers. There were the ‘snows of yesteryear’; there was the cherry, ‘hung with white upon the bough’; there was Mary’s...