“Nothing will wake that man,” she complains. “He snores like a tractor, yet gets a peaceful night’s rest, night after night.” She shakes her head. “And the way he eats!”
Once she’s started with her list of Things, you know you’re going to be listening for a while.
“Seconds for him, every night, and the pudding!”
Gran doesn’t approve of Grampa, because she doesn’t really like anyone to enjoy themselves too much.
The other problem with Grampa is his language. He uses some terrible words, and Gran doesn’t like that one bit. She doesn’t say anything when he does it, but then afterwards she talks about it. So when he swears, we watch Gran, and she looks at us with big eyes and a tight mouth, and she closes her fists in a “You see what I’m talking about!” kind of way. There’s one dreadful word that Grampa uses, that Gran never even notices. He says it a lot, and Mom has told us it’s such a terrible word, we must never ever say it. It’s the k-word. Beth wanted to know from Mom if it’s worse than fuck, and Mom said, yes, definitely, but never say that either.
* * *
Today Grampa is wearing wellies because it’s raining, but usually he farms in funny-looking shoes he calls brogues. He polishes them with brown Nugget every day. He also has newer ones for town and church. The neighbours laugh at Grampa’s shoes. They say it’s an English affectation of his wife’s, but Gran really doesn’t care what Grampa has on his feet, as long as they can be wiped clean on a doormat.
At bedtime, Grampa gives us a hug. His beard has a soft scratch to it, like dry leaves. It smells like coffee and chocolate. Some people say his beard makes him look like the Duke of Kent, but he says no, the Duke looks like a Scottish terrier, so he doesn’t think so.
Sometimes Grampa sneaks up on us, but it’s always a joke. “Oh-ho-ho, you’re your mother’s child,” he says to me when he finds me with my hand in the biscuit tin. And then he pours me a glass of milk to go with my biscuit. It’s thick and creamy, straight from the cow. We sit down together, me with my biscuit and milk, him with his black, sludgy coffee that looks like tar and tastes as bitter as aloes, and he tells me stories about the farm and its people. Sometimes Beth finds us in the kitchen, and then Grampa offers her a chair, a snack and a drink, and then we both listen.
Grampa loves this land of round hills and small dams. He says his roots are stuck in it, same as the blue gum tree’s roots. And the blue gum didn’t start off here, either.
Grampa tells us why his father moved here almost a hundred years ago. “The sheep, they vrekked one after the other,” he explains. “It’s a difficult life when you can’t feed your animals. Because then you can’t feed your family either.” He sucks on his pipe.
“In our family, we know about starvation,” he says. “When your greatuncle Abie got back from the war” – and here we pull faces, because we know what’s coming, but pretend we’ve never heard it before – “he was so hungry from starving all over North Africa and Italy that the first thing he did when he got home, was eat.”
That doesn’t sound too bad, but wait –
“Your great-granny prepared a feast of boerekos. Roast lamb, potatoes, sweet pumpkin and rice. And old Abie put away most of the roast in one sitting, and died three days later because his body couldn’t handle food any more.”
“Least of all, Great-grandmother’s food!” we finish the story.
“But shhh, don’t tell. The rest of the district thinks he’s a war hero, died in a POW camp,” and with this comes the wink, and of course Beth and I love this. Because secrets are fun.
This isn’t the only secret in our family. There’s also the story of Grampa’s other brother, Uncle Klaas. But this is not a story we hear from Grampa. This is a story that comes from picking up stompies. The problem with Uncle Klaas, they say, is that his voël was so itchy. Then, one day, they found him behind a stone wall, consorting with a man called Skaap, which was like breaking two of God’s laws in one, and then Uncle Klaas had to go away. He went to Australia, because everyone knows that’s where heathens go. I don’t know what a voël is, but obviously it causes lots of problems, and I can only hope I don’t have one of my own.
* * *
It’s mainly because of Grampa that I like going to the farm. But getting there isn’t so much fun. In summer it gets so hot in my mom’s Beetle that the seats stink, and my legs sweat against them. Beth has a weak stomach, so sometimes the smell and the twisty road make her want to throw up. This usually happens on Sir Lowry’s Pass, where you can’t really stop, and then my mom shouts at me to open Beth’s window, which is hard to do because I’m strapped in at the front seat, and Beth is in the back. I have to hang all the way over my seat like a jolly monkey, and usually I have to unclip my seatbelt, but I have to help her because I’m the eldest and Mom’s driving.
When we’re travelling to faraway places, we all fight at one time or another. Gracie and Beth fight because one has more space than the other, or one of them got the shady side of the car. Luckily, I’m out of those fights. But then my mother decides it’s tea time, which means it’s my turn to fight – with the flask. I hate this so much. Grown-ups are always wanting tea, and I just can’t understand it. I’ve only been doing it for a short while now, because Mom says I’m only just big enough to work with boiling water. She says I’m so clever, and I’m so good with my hands, and that’s why I get to do this special thing to help her. But I don’t like it one bit. You have to get the mug out – it’s a red enamel one – and then put the tea bag in. Then you have to wrap the mug in a tea towel and hold it between your legs, and fish the flask out of the basket. It’s heavy, and the top takes forever to screw off. Then you pour very, very carefully, and hope the road doesn’t get bumpy. Then it’s the three sugars. And the milk, which is kept in a cooldrink bottle.
Mom is always very worried we’ll get hungry, so she packs stacks of sandwiches in an old Dairymaid ice-cream tub. She makes cheese and tomato, peanut butter and syrup, or apricot jam and coconut sarmies.
It’s a lucky thing Beth has started eating different kinds of food again, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to have any of this. For a while, she ate only red food. It was all red apples, red jelly babies, tomatoes, toast with strawberry jam, spaghetti with All Gold tomato sauce. In the end she was really jittery, and she could never sit still. The grown-ups were worried about her, and kept trying to make her eat peas and carrots and meat. My mom cried a lot, and then one day she took Beth to the Juicy Lucy in town while I was at school. Mom could only take one of us, because we don’t have money, and the one person had to be Beth because she was sick. So they went to the Juicy Lucy, and in the end Beth couldn’t say no to a waffle with ice cream, bananas and syrup. That’s how she became normal again.
It’s not just the tea. I’m in charge of the sandwiches too. It’s a good thing we have them, because we’re all hungry by the time we pass Somerset West. Especially me, because the sandwich tub sits under my feet. The sarmies are always the first thing we check for when we’re ready to leave. We can’t go off without our padkos.
Mom is always quite nervous when we’re on our way to Gran. She combs her hair too much, paints her nails a pale colour and wears pink lipstick that she never wears at home. She tries on lots of different clothes while she’s packing, so that in the end her room’s a big mess. She struggles with zips and buttons popping off. With the first zip trouble she’ll say, “Oh bugger,” but then later on she screams, “Fuck!” and thumps the floorboards, thinking we can’t hear her. If you peep into the room, you’ll see her sitting on the floor with a red face. And then she packs lots of loose jerseys and things like ponchos. I think it’s because my gran doesn’t like fat people.
But you mustn’t be too thin either.
“Look at this little stick insect!” she always says when she sees Beth, and, staring at me, “Hmm. It’s easy to see that she leaves you to eat every single thing you can find.”