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right there in my pants. It’s not every day you are responsible for an epileptic fit that nearly kills a person. Mevrou looked at me and said with a tone of contempt, ‘ Ag , you couldn’t do it, you too small to swat a fly!’
    She moved to the next bed. ‘Bokkie Swartz, did you do it, did you hit Kobus?’
    â€˜ Nee , Mevrou!’ Bokkie answered.
    She reached the last boy’s bed, only to be met with the same resounding denial. She stood there panting and was very red in the face.
    â€˜Off!’ she commanded, whereupon we all undid our belts and our khaki shorts dropped to our ankles, exposing our waterworks that we were quick to cup with our hands.
    â€˜ Hou vas !’ came the next command and we all turned and gripped the bedpost from which the towel hung, one hand on either side of it.
    â€˜ Buk !’ We all went into sjambok position, bending at the waist to present our bare arses for the leather strap. I could hear the whacks approaching, three to each boy. I’d stopped shaking, counting myself dead lucky, three cuts was a small price for not being found out. I gripped the end of the iron bed harder in anticipation of my turn but Mevrou just continued past me and gave Piet Grobler at the next bed three of the best. Whack! Whack! Whack!
    She arrived back at the top bed, her nightdress clinging to her large frame due to the sweat from the exertion of giving twenty-five boys three of the best. I must say it wasn’t a very nice look. Afterwards all the guys said they’d seen her great black bush through her nightdress. But I must have forgotten to look or something, not knowing about black bushes on grown-up people.
    â€˜Don’t think you heard the end of this, you hear?’ she screamed. ‘Kobus Vermaak had a very bad epileptic fit and he could have died,’ she said. ‘Just lucky the pig boy found him lying in the dirt and called us. If it wasn’t for the kaffir boy he could have swallowed his tongue and choked to death. We going to find out who done it, don’t you worry about that. Kobus says someone threw him with a stone in the stomach but he didn’t see who done it. But the kaffir saw it and he will know who is the guilty person. When we catch this wicked boy he will go to Meneer Prinsloo for punishment and spend a day in the tank!’
    The tank was an empty, rusted corrugated iron 500-gallon water tank outside the laundry building that was just tall enough to hold a boy standing up and sufficiently wide to accommodate one sitting with his legs crossed. You had to climb in from a hole in the top and when they put the lid back on it was pitch dark with only tiny holes in the sides so a bit of air could get in. You could only be sentenced to the tank in the winter as it was too hot in the summer, and you could die from the hot air and the perspiration it caused. They said all the sweat would leak out of you and you’d just shrivel up and die, you’d become a piece of biltong .
    It was my lucky day alright. I knew Mattress would never tell on me even if he had seen it happen, which he can’t have, because he wasn’t there. I’d punched Pissy so there was no stone throwing. It was funny. I usually got punished for stuff I didn’t do and here I was getting away with a terrible epileptic fit crime I did do. But, there you go, the rule was that you took everything you could get away with because it didn’t happen too often.
    But the big question remained: why hadn’t Pissy Vermaak dobbed me in? It just wasn’t like him at all. All I could think was that perhaps he was unwilling to admit that the smallest and weakest boy in The Boys Farm had given him a hiding. That seemed to make sense, nobody, not even a sissy like Pissy, would be able to live with the shame when it was known that Voetsek the rooinek had got the better of him.
    All I could think was that Tinker was safe and nobody except Mattress and me