Whitethorn by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online Page A

superintendent, could do anything he liked about the crust situation, you still couldn’t just go around hollowing out loaves of bread and giving the chickens the crust. This was because food was scarce and . . . ‘God will not tolerate waste and nor will I,’ he’d say to us. But if we left a few crusts lying around after breakfast or any of the other meals, that was a different matter altogether. This was a definite thing God allowed you to do.
    The bread was good on Monday and Tuesday, so crusts were always scarce on those days, but by Wednesday it was becoming a bit stale and by Friday or Saturday you could collect heaps. On Sunday it was the Lord’s Day, so no bread. There was only mielie meal porridge with brown sugar and milk for breakfast, for lunch cold potatoes and other vegetables like beetroot and grated carrot and cold pumpkin and cabbage chopped up, raw stuff like that. At night it was always potato soup and bread pudding made from the leftover stale bread you couldn’t even cut with a knife, so they’d soak it on Saturday. If you looked through the kitchen window on a Saturday afternoon you’d see all the leftover stale bread with the crust removed for the chickens soaking in these white enamel basins, ready for Sunday night’s bread pudding. With no bread on a Sunday I had to get a double ration of crusts on Saturday, otherwise Tinker would starve.
    Because Tinker didn’t need too many crusts I could always rely on a pocketful for her and also at supper you could maybe manage to rub your own crusts in the stew gravy left on your plate. Sorry to go on about it, but feeding a puppy you’re not supposed to have wasn’t an easy business and I just wanted you to know how it was done. So I would give her the crusts and the half jam tin of milk that Mattress got for her at the dairy that would be put in a certain place behind the empty milk churns for me to get after school. Sometimes the milk went bad in the heat and turned into sour milk but Tinker didn’t seem to mind. She was a dog and a half, I can tell you, I never saw anything she didn’t eat. I loved her so much she made me want to cry.
    Have you noticed that food is the biggest preoccupation people have in life? If people don’t eat fast and they talk while they’re eating then you know they came from a good family. The speed people eat is a dead giveaway to their past. I have to say that the brown bread we had at The Boys Farm must have been full of good things because although Tinker wasn’t fat, she wasn’t thin either, not like a kaffir dog. Mattress said she was good and would grow up to be strong. Sometimes he even saved a bit of gristle from the meat he was given by the kitchen to cook with his mielie pap, and occasionally there would be a small bone for her to gnaw. What a happy little dog she was, with her tail that hadn’t been chopped off always wagging and when you saw her in the morning she’d yelp and turn round and round and jump up to tell you how nice it was to see you again.
    The day when Mevrou had walloped Pissy’s pillow and shouted ‘ Genoeg !’ I went down to the pigsty to see Mattress. Winter was coming and by the time we got back from school it was already sunset and getting a bit cold, but we didn’t get our jersey until a month later. Mattress had a fire going at the pigsty where he was making a mash for the pigs – old vegetables, cabbage leaves and the like and some of the leftover buttermilk from the dairy and some mielies . He boiled it all up, stirring once in a while with a big carved wooden stick like a paddle. We stood by the nice warm fire and he told me how he’d found Pissy flopping like a platanna you’ve just caught in the creek.
    A platanna is a kind of frog, dark green with a smooth skin on top and a yellowish stomach. Sometimes in the summer, when the creek wasn’t so cold, you could take a bit of bread