Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free PDF Page A

long row and watch the undergraduates practising cricket, because it’s fun to giggle and point if a batsman is wearing his groin guard on the outside of his trousers and to shout out ‘Hard cheese’ and ‘Hard luck’ in groany voices when someone’s been given out. It makes the batsmen get really narky.
    â€˜You kids clear off!’ they say. ‘Go on. Scram!
Voetsek
!’
    Then Dinah’s family furniture comes. There isn’t all that much of it and, in the kitchen, they just have wooden orange boxes for cupboards with cheap cretonne curtains strung across the fronts, but there are the two ornate, throne-like chairs – Grandfather Gieseke’s chairs – which are definitely not bungalow chairs. They were carved by Dinah’s mum’s grandad for whom woodcarving was a hobby and they date from the 1870s, but their style is sort of Jacobean-baronial and they look as though they could be used for the banqueting scene in
Macbeth
. They are large and square, with heavy arms and stretchers, and they’re made of dark, heavily carved oak. Their arms and legs and tall backs are transformed into a mass of vine leaves, barley-sugar twists and Gothic inscriptions from the Lutheran Bible. And then there are three new consumer items that cause excitement. There’s a fridge called Frigidaire, and a small brand-new upright piano for their mum.And there’s a radiogram like a cupboard for their dad whose growing collection of classical-music records is stored in big flat boxes with file-reference numbers. But the best thing about the new radiogram is that it comes with a rogue demo record that’s completely unlike the rest of their dad’s collection and Dinah and Lisa love it to bits. This is because all of one side is taken up with a song called ‘Little Piggy’. So they ask for it over and over, and they always sing along:
    Every little Piggy has a curly tail
And nobody knows the reason why.
    Dinah loves having all the trees to climb on the Butcher Estate. Some of them grow so close to the bungalow roofs that she can picnic on a variety of staff rooftops. She rigs up a pulley system with a large fire bucket to haul up her dolls. She and some of the boys even haul up Lisa, who doesn’t like to climb but wants to join in. Then, when the monkeys come on raids to steal their bananas, all the children retreat in haste, leaving poor Lisa wailing on the roof that she’s stuck. Dinah always has to run home on these occasions and call their mum.
    â€˜Ma!’ she yells. ‘Quick! Lisa’s stuck!’
    This becomes a very frequent refrain.
    About the monkeys, there’s a big divide on the Butcher Estate and it’s usually immigrants versus native-born South Africans. The foreigners think the monkeys are exciting but the locals, including most of the students, think they’re a pest and talk about them as if they were rats to be got rid of. Plans for monkey pogroms are hatched from time to time so that the Butcher Estate can be purged of them and stories are swapped about monkeys attacking women and children.
    There are several folk remedies proposed for getting rid of the monkeys. One is to nail a dead monkey to a tree, which will drive all the others into exile. Another is to dip a live monkey in a bucket of whitewash and then let it go. The whitewashed monkey will then frighten off all the other monkeys, who will run away and set up house somewhere else. Dinah thinks the second idea is even more horrible than the first because she feels so sorry for the whitewashed monkey who will be left all alone after the others have gone, justlike the lame boy on crutches in ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ who got left out of the magic hill.
    Angel-face starts school just one year ahead of Tiny-mite. It’s the year in which she turns seven. The school is called Berea Road Government School for Girls. She wears a grass-green sleeveless pinafore