The Housemaid's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

to play. Older men like Master did not march, they went to meetings in the town hall opposite the Karoo Gardens where I used to sit under the palms, and talked for many hours about somewhere called ‘Up North’.
    One day Madam gave me a message for Master and I stood at the back waiting to give it to him. All the important men in Cradock – or perhaps the whole Karoo – sat around a table, and talked in loud voices and sometimes banged the table with their hands like you do when you are making bread. There was a man in a gold chain, and many with long beards. They did not look at me, so I listened to what they were saying. I often listened to what people were saying when they didn’t expect me to hear them.
    ‘Why should our boys have to fight and they don’t?’ I heard one man say loudly.
    ‘Throw them in jail,’ said another. ‘It’s treason!’
    I didn’t know what treason was. But it must have been bad because jail was where you were sent when you had killed or hurt someone so badly that you had to be locked away forever. There was a jail at the far end of Bree Street, and I think that was one of the reasons Mama would not let me walk to the strict St James School that lay beyond it. And jail, Mama once said, was not just for bad people. Jail could reach out and snatch you if you weren’t careful.
    ‘What is it, Ada?’ Master had come over to where I was standing. He was in his shirtsleeves, and I noticed that his collar was drooping. It was hard to find starch because of the war. I held out the note. He read it, passed a hand over his thinning hair and then crumpled the note up in his fist. There were small drops of sweat on his forehead.
    ‘Tell the Madam I will be back as soon as I can,’ he said, not looking at me and turning quickly to go back to the table of shouting men. That was the time when we found out that young Master Phil was to go to the war.
    At first, Master Phil just had to wear a uniform and practise the sort of marching he used to do while Madam played the piano when he was a boy. He would come home each night after a day of marching in the veld, and have dinner and then go again in the morning while Madam’s scales swept through house. I was very proud of him and took extra care with the ironing of his khaki shirts. He even had time for the odd game of cricket with the other boys who were learning to be soldiers, although the dusty marching square where they played dirtied his cricket whites and gave me extra scrubbing that he was always sorry about.
    ‘What do you do in the war?’ I asked him one day when he came home early and was lying on his back in the grass watching the sky through the kaffirboom leaves. I was pegging washing on the line. ‘Is it very hard?’
    He sat up on an elbow and looked at me. Master Phil and I had always talked easily, from the time he first showed me numbers and even when he seemed to be growing beyond me. Master Phil was my friend, the first friend I ever had. ‘It’s not hard yet,’ he said after a pause, ‘but it will be when I’m sent off to fight.’
    I thought about this as I pegged up a pillowcase. ‘Will you be afraid?’
    He looked across at the house. Madam was at tea with friends, my mother was in the laundry, and faint sounds of dance music filtered from Miss Rose’s open window.
    ‘I hope not, I…’ he reached for a leaf and began to tear it into neat pieces along the line of the veins. His fair hair flopped on to his forehead. ‘I don’t want to be afraid – but what if I am?’
    A silence fell between us. His sleeves were rolled up and I could see where the marching had made the muscles of his arms rise in strong cords under his skin. Dear Master Phil, always so keen, always at the front of every game, always wanting to play his part. I was sure he would make a great soldier, too.
    ‘I don’t want to be afraid of the tokoloshe, ’ I said, leaving the washing, and kneeling down at his side, ‘but it is God the