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back to The Boys Farm. Sunday everywhere else may have been a day of rest, the Lord’s Day, but on the farm we had to work in the vegetable garden or chop the week’s wood for the kitchen and for the laundry hot-water system. It was the only day we didn’t have school or sport so it became the main working day. On Saturday night after supper we’d get our weekly change of clothes, a clean pair of khaki shorts and shirt so we could wear them to church in the morning. But after church we had to get back into our last week’s dirty clothes because the rest of Sunday was a working-in-the-vegetable-garden day. Then we’d shower again on Sunday night so we’d be clean and put on our going-to-church nice clean clothes again on Monday for school. You didn’t get boots until you were thirteen. All us little kids had to bother about was trying to keep both items clean for a week. If you spilt gravy on a shirt or got your pants dirty so that they looked worse than anyone else’s you got the sjambok . I was almost certain to get the sjambok every Wednesday because it didn’t matter how hard I tried, my shirt and shorts were always the worst in our dormitory. Keeping clean was a very tiresome business and I wouldn’t get the hang of it until I was much older.
    Mevrou stood waiting with her fat sister-in-law beside us outside the church on the side of the road while her brother went to bring his lorry around to pick the two of them up and take Mevrou to the main family farm. She had six brothers and they all had farms next door to each other in a valley somewhere in the high mountains. She’d once told us that her father had found this valley in 1898 after the Boer War because he never wanted to see anyone that was English. He’d built his house and he never left the farm again, not even to come to nagmaal. The six brothers only went to school to learn to count and read a bit and then went back to the farm. In the district they were known to be very tough and you wouldn’t want to pick a fight with a Van Schalkwyk if you wanted to stay alive for long.
    Two of Mevrou’s brothers played rugby for Northern Transvaal and Boetie, the one who had gone to fetch the lorry, was once the amateur heavyweight boxing champion of the Transvaal with twenty fights and seventeen knockouts. He was banned from amateur boxing because in a championship fight he was boxing against an English-speaking heavyweight from Johannesburg. It turned out to be a very even fight and Boetie Van Schalkwyk managed to knock the rooinek out but it happened right on the bell in the final round, or just after the bell, the three judges said. So the boxer from Jo’burg was given the decision. When the referee held up the other boxer’s hand, Boetie lost his temper and turned around and smashed the other boxer in the jaw and knocked him out a second time for good measure. People said the Van Schalkwyks were wild men who talked first with their fists and were best left alone. I just thought you’d like to know this stuff about Mevrou’s family.
    Anyway, we’re standing at the side of the road outside the church when this town kid on a bicycle comes riding towards us showing off big time, riding with his hands in his pockets. This kid knew none of us could ever own a bicycle and he was free to do what he liked and had the whole day to do anything he cared to do. He made the mistake of coming too close to Flippy Marais who was standing next to me so I saw the whole thing happen. Flippy quickly stuck his foot out, planted it against the frame of the bike and gave it a great push. With no grip on the handlebars the kid lost control. Next moment it veered straight into Mevrou who landed on her enormous fat bum and her legs stuck up in the air showing her pink crepe de Chine bloomers that came down to just above her knees where the elastic bands cut into the flesh. The brown paper bag went flying and landed