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black people.
    Now, Mevrou didn’t have one of those, a proper sjambok . What she had was a thick piece of leather about the length and thickness of a razor strop nailed onto a wooden handle. We called it a sjambok because that’s what we called anything that the staff beat you with. Her particular sjambok couldn’t kill you or anything, but it left a pretty broad mark on your bum, and it hurt like hell. Meneer Prinsloo and Meneer Botha used a long bamboo cane as their sjambok and you could tell who was who by the cuts on a person’s bum. All the little kids had broad marks from Mevrou’s sjambok and the older kids had these red and blue cuts that were the marks from the cane. When a kid got to be eleven he’d show his first cane cuts and brag how he’d taken six of the best and hadn’t even blubbed. It was a tradition to take your punishment like a man and not even let out an ‘Ooh!’ or a single ‘ Eina !’ which is an Afrikaans ‘ouch’, although I have to admit I wasn’t always very good at this particular tradition.
    When Mevrou entered the dormitory we’d all shout out the mandatory ‘ Goeie môre, Mevrou ! Good morning, Missus!’
    â€˜ Goeie môre, kinders ,’ she’d reply on a good day.
    On a good morning she’d wear a green, starched uniform and her hair would be pulled back in a tight bun at the back of her head, with a net holding the bun. Sometimes she’d appear first thing in the morning in her nightdress and slippers with her grey hair looking like scouring wire and falling all over the place. Her teeth would be missing so her lips sort of caved in with little slanted vertical lines pulling inwards around her lips like the drawstring on a pipe tobacco bag. On these occasions the whites of her eyes would be blood-red and the front of her nightdress would be unbuttoned and through the white thin cotton nightgown you’d see the shape of her great breasts. You could also see the teats, blackish and bigger than the sow’s, at the end of her titties. The top part of her breasts pushed out of the unbuttoned part of her nightdress, great white lumps like bread dough with a black fly sitting on one of the rounded pieces of dough, only it was a hairy mole. Half-jack inspection was always a dangerous time but on those occasions when she appeared in her nightdress, you’d better watch out, man, this was no time for jokes.
    Also, on nightdress mornings we’d shout, ‘Goeie môre, Mevrou !’ as usual and all that would come in reply would be ‘ Hurrump !’ It was a snort exactly like the sow’s. That’s when you knew it was going to be a bad, bad day for everyone concerned because she’d been to bed with Doctor Half-Jack. Half a bottle of Tolley’s five-star brandy in those days came in a flat bottle known as a half-jack. One Sunday when Mevrou had her day off to visit her brother and sister-in-law, which she did after church, she had an accident. She always carried her handbag and also one of those big brown paper shopping bags with string handles and if you got a glimpse inside you’d see all these little parcels of the same size wrapped in newspaper. Nobody knew what these could possibly be because they were too small to be loaves of bread and you wouldn’t wrap a cake in newspaper like that and anyway, why would you have all those cakes? What’s more, when Mevrou returned just before supper on Sunday night she still carried the paper bag, and if you got near enough to take a peek the little parcels in newspaper were still there exactly the same as in the morning when she’d left. It was a very strange business we couldn’t get to the bottom of, until her accident.
    On this particular morning when church was over and the beetle had chomped the beard and I’d received my mandatory punches in the ribs, we were all lined up beside the road, ready to be marched