Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido

has a story about how one day their mother went out and came back home to find that the native girl was drinking out of one of the family’s china teacups. Ughh! The native girl always gets the sack if she’s caught and it serves her right. Because if you give them an inch they take a mile. That’s what natives are like.
    Native girl or koelie? The question is taking quite a while to reach Dinah because of her position in the circle, so she is able to suss that everyone would prefer a native girl to make her sandwiches rather than a koelie.
    â€˜I’d like a native girl to make my sandwiches,’ Dinah says.
    Koelies are inherently more threatening than natives. Koelies are a plague in our midst. The girls talk about koelies just as if they were like cockroaches. Squash them and they’re yellow inside. Natives are all right. They’re just more stupid, but you can train them to be more hygienic. Everyone has a story about what thick skulls natives have. Everyone, except Dinah, has actually
seen
a bus driver knock down a native and drive right over his head. Afterwards the native always just gets up and walks away.
    In history nice Mrs Hale explains that we have Indian immigrants in Natal to work on the sugar plantations because a native’s idea of hard work is to sit under a tree with his hat over his eyes. And, one Wednesday, when it’s the day to bring in extra sandwiches for the poor children in the native location, the headmistress holds up two huge doorstep sandwiches from the charity basket and asks which girl has brought them. Then, when Hilary Barber puts her hand up, Dinah thinks that she’s going to get into trouble for bringing such horrible wedges of bread with a scrape of jam and no butter.
    â€˜Look at Hilary’s sandwiches, girls,’ says the head. ‘These are the sort of sandwiches that a native likes.’
    She doesn’t tell the girls what Indians like because we don’t bring sandwiches for them. Ughh!
    Hilary’s dad is a lawyer and one day, in class, when the teacher says does anyone know what a lawyer does, Hilary puts up her hand.
    â€˜My dad’s a lawyer,’ she says.
    â€˜And what does he do?’ says the teacher.
    â€˜He does lawyer work,’ Hilary says.
    Dinah’s dad plays tennis on Sunday mornings with an Indian lawyer called Veejay Pillay. Dinah is terrified that someone at school will find this out.
    â€˜Your dad plays tennis with koelies. Ughh!’
    Dinah’s mum is a bit exercised about Mr Pillay as well. They quarrel about it at home. Their mum isn’t against Mr Pillay but she thinks their dad shouldn’t be sticking his neck out. Lisa and Dinah copy their dad and laugh at their mum for being such a coward, but Dinah’s mum is right in thinking politics can get scary. She’s the only one in the family who has seen Hitler with her own eyes. And as a child after the First World War, she can remember seeing a Communist demonstration being broken up on her way home from school. She saw Rosa Luxemburg address a crowd in Berlin, but the police came and banged people on the head with truncheons and threw them into police cars. Dinah’s mum saw blood spurt from a man’s nose when a policeman banged him on the head. So she knows that if you’re a Communist then someone will bang you on the head and make blood spurt out of your nose.
    She knows that where politics is concerned you should keep your head down – and sometimes quite literally. She can remember the time when her own father quickly pushed her brother Otto’s head down on the balcony that overlooked their Berlin street. Her brother had stuck his hand out and called out
‘Heil Hitler
!’ in a piercing joke voice when a troop of Nazis went by, all marching in step. Her father saw one of the officers look up and scan the balconies, but by that time Otto wasn’t visible because he was on the floor. All the same,