Boxall.
‘Does Mevrou speak Afrikaans?’ he asked me.
I shook my head. ‘I’ll translate, if you like?’
Gert nodded. ‘Tell her she’s got more power now, you only had three cylinders firing,’ he spoke fast, swallowing his words as he fought his shyness, ‘but you still got a bad knock in the diff.’ He turned to Mrs Boxall. ‘If you can get it here tomorrow, maybe just after you been to church, I’ll borrow the Plymouth and drive you home and I’ll fix the car up for you.’ I introduced Gert to Mrs Boxall and translated what he’d said. Mrs Boxall was very grateful and called Gert ‘A dear, sweet boy,’ which I didn’t translate but I think he understood because he seemed very embarrassed.
‘Oh dear, I have no idea what a knock in the diff is. Is it something very bad?’
‘It’s the differential, I think it’s pretty bad,’ I replied without consulting Gert.
Pulling up his socks which were already pulled up Gert stammered, ‘Good night, Missis,’ in English and then walked quickly away into the dark.
We zoomed away and Mrs Boxall had no trouble driving up the Sheba road hill. The difference in Charlie was amazing now that we were driving on all cylinders. We dropped Doc off at the bottom of his hill. I think the new four-cylinder Charlie could’ve made it easily but Mrs Boxall had never been invited by Doc to his cottage and she said as she drove me home, ‘This wasn’t the right time’ – whatever that was supposed to mean.
SIXTEEN
Mrs Boxall promised to talk to my mother about the new letter writing arrangements in the prison. These were to take place on a Sunday morning and I had some real doubts about being allowed to partake in them. Sundays were difficult for me, it was a day filled with taboos, beginning with Sunday school and church in the morning and ending with evening service, which consisted of a short message from Pastor Mulvery and then ‘a precious time’, when the congregation witnessed for the Lord. I wasn’t allowed to do anything except the Lord’s work on a Sunday, but as I wasn’t a born-again Christian any of the Lord’s work I might do, like reading the Shangaan Bible to Dee and Dum, wasn’t creating any bricks for my mansion in the sky. Reading the Bible was regarded as the most superior type of work for the Lord. I was required to read three pages of the New Testament every day and ten pages on Sunday, and I did my compulsory Sunday reading during Pastor Mulvery’s Message from the Lord. You’d think if something was called a message from the Lord, it would be a proper message, such as you might give to a person. But Pastor Mulvery’s messages rambled all over the place threading bits of the scripture together and frequently leading to wildly unusual conclusions which tended to prove Pastor Mulvery was right while all the gospel scholars since St Paul were wrong. He would call the Catholic Church the ‘Catlicks’ and they were his special target. He would go to endless trouble to demonstrate that the Catlicks had perverted the Word of God. He would point out that the Latin scholars who had translated the St James version into English from an original Catlick translation had not understood the original Greek translation of the original Hebrew. As Pastor Mulvery knew no Latin and no Greek and certainly no Hebrew and never gave examples of the corrupted Words of God in Latin or Greek so that I could at least check his accuracy with Doc, he was able to build some pretty impressive arguments against the perfidy of the Catholic Church. I can tell you one thing, you wouldn’t have wanted to be a Catlick on a Sunday evening service with Pastor Mulvery delivering one of his messages.
Because reading the Bible on Sunday didn’t count for my heavenly brick account, I was expected to find other kinds of good deed stuff. Each Sunday evening my mother would question me closely about this. Sometimes I really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for things to claim, like praying for Hitler. Which I hadn’t done of course, but it sounded good and was unusual enough to throw my mother off the scent.
In fact praying for Hitler created a real crisis at that evening’s debate. Marie, who was always there for supper on Sundays, said praying for Hitler wasn’t valid coming from me, as it was a case of one sinner praying for another. My mother then debated with her as to whether a sinner praying for a sinner was an okay idea. My granpa said he thought it was time he was excused from the table so that he could go to his room and pray for fewer debates of this sort. My mother then said, as it was Sunday, she was not going to tell him how rude and hurtful his remark had been.
So getting to the prison for two hours every Sunday to take dictation wasn’t simply a question of Mrs Boxall asking my mother. A great deal of toing and froing to the Lord would have to take place and my fear was that the Lord was going to be hard put to see that taking dictation from a bunch of criminals was the very best possible use of my indentured Sabbath.
My fears proved to be correct and the scheme had to be delayed a month while my mother and the Lord came to grips with the small print. A major investigation such as this one would begin by looking for a precedent in the Bible. In this regard I scored a direct hit when I pointed out that St Paul, in his Epistles, had written from prison in Rome. This was just the sort of material my mother liked to take with her when she had a chat with the Lord and so I expected an early reply from Him. My granpa said later that my St Paul research was a stroke of genius. But, it turned out, the Lord wasn’t all that satisfied because Paul was a born-again Christian, personally converted on the road to Damascus, and he was in prison under an unjust Roman regime. The prisoners in Barberton prison were criminals being punished by a just regime. The point here was that Paul was doing the Lord’s work while I was potentially aiding the devil writing letters from hardened criminals, bound to be up to no good, spreading a network of subterfuge and intrigue throughout South Africa.
I wasn’t able to tell my mother how innocent the letters really were because she didn’t know about the previous letters or the tobacco, sugar and salt. So for the next week I read the New Testament like mad. There had to be something in there to help me. Pastor Mulvery was always taking bits and pieces of disconnected scripture and putting them together to mean just about anything; surely I could do the same.
I took the problem to Doc but for once he wasn’t much help. He pointed out according to the great German Lutheran scholars the prison writings of St Paul probably took place about AD 63. Which was nice to know, but no help whatsoever.
Doc’s mind was far too logical for this kind of thing so I took the problem to my granpa who, after my telling opening move with St Paul, seemed anxious to see that the debate was conducted fairly. We sat on the steps of one of the rose terraces, my granpa tapping and tamping and lighting and staring squinty-eyed through the blue tobacco smoke over the rusty roof into the pale blue beyond. After a long time he said, ‘All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life. He told me that ever since he’d always carried a Bible into battle with him and he felt perfectly safe because God was in his breast pocket. We were out looking for a sergeant of the Worcesters and three troopers who were wounded while out on a reconnaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry
However, on Sunday night three weeks after Mrs Boxall had first approached my mother, my granpa elected to play a part in the supper debate. My mother opened by saying the Lord was ‘sorely troubled’ over the whole issue
