Free Whitethorn by Bryce Courtenay

rooms, the room that was Mevrou’s personal office. The other room was where you stayed if you were too sick for the dormitory or were put in quarantine for the measles and stuff that was maybe catching. If you had to go to the sick room for something and the door was closed, what you did was go into the garden and creep through the hydrangea bushes and take a look to see if Mevrou was alone and at her desk, because sometimes she’d be lying snoring on the leather examination couch she sometimes used to examine people on. You see, you weren’t supposed to go to the sick room until after supper, only in an extreme emergency. If you disturbed her it was big trouble, I can tell you.
    You remember the scratch on my arm from the whitethorn bush? Well, it festered badly and I hadn’t gone to the sick room to have Mevrou take a look at it because then she’d ask me how it happened. I wasn’t so good at lying and remember, Meneer Botha said I wasn’t at the big rock when it happened. So I thought maybe she’d ask and I’d have to lie and she’d find out and next thing Tinker is ‘a dead dog or my name isn’t Frikkie Botha’. But Mevrou Prinsloo, the superintendent’s wife, stopped me to tell me to do up my trouser fly buttons that I must have forgotten. When I did she saw my arm and how it had gone all red and there was pus coming out and she told me to go and see Mevrou at once. So that’s why I was creeping through the bushes to see if it was all clear to go in and knock on the door. And that’s when I overheard what I’m going to tell you. There was Mevrou and Pissy Vermaak and the window was open a little bit so I heard everything, hiding in the hydrangea bushes.
    â€˜What were the two of you doing in that part of the farm where nobody goes?’ I heard her ask.
    Pissy repeated the story of going to shoot bush doves with their cattys. Every kid on The Boys Farm had a catty. You made one by cutting two thin strips of rubber about a quarter of an inch wide and twelve inches long from an old car inner tube. Then you’d cut a forked stick from a branch, find an old piece of leather for the pouch and bind them all together using even thinner strips of inner tube. When you were finished you had your own deadly weapon to shoot birds with. The bigger boys were able to make really powerful ones that could take a stone high up into the branches of a stand of tall blue gum trees. There was a small forest of about twenty huge trees beside the stream, not far from where I’d found Tinker. This was a favourite place for bush doves, they’d roost high up in the very top branches and nowhere else. In the late afternoon you could hear them cookarooing. If the bigger boys shot three or four they’d make a fire and roast them, as they were fat and plump and delicious from eating some farmer’s mielies . Not that I’d eaten one. I was too small to use a strong enough catty and I didn’t possess the skill to bring a bush dove down from the high-up branches. I also wasn’t allowed to chop any wood or light a fire. Sometimes a bigger boy would shoot six or seven doves and he’d give them to Mevrou in exchange for three C to C cigarettes. She loved to put the bush doves into a pie. She said they were her favourite food from when she was a girl on her father’s farm. Anyone who wanted to get in her good books knew how to do it. So, you see, she knew all about bush doves and where they came from.
    â€˜Bush doves? You were looking for bush doves, hey?’ she asked Pissy.
    â€˜Yes, Mevrou, and Fonnie climbed the big rock to take a look where they were,’ Pissy replied, once again confirming the story going around.
    â€˜This big rock, is it the big rock where the whitethorn grows on the other side of the pigsty?’
    â€˜Yes, Mevrou,’ Pissy answered.
    â€˜So tell me, man, this rock is 400 yards away from the stream where the