Whitethorn by Bryce Courtenay

big dining chair Mevrou had for the express purpose and strap your ankles to its legs. The front legs of this chair were placed on two wooden boxes so that it tilted backwards. Mevrou would stand behind the chair and clasp both her big hands over your forehead and pull your head hard against the back of the chair, holding it steady with her body. Doctor Dyke would tell you to open your mouth wide and he’d tap your teeth with his callipers and when your eyes got big and frightened he knew he had the right tooth. If he was doing an emergency on the way back from town you could smell the beer on his breath, a sort of sour smell that wasn’t very nice. He’d take his horse pliers and just pull that tooth out, without chloroform or an injection. He’d hold up the tooth in the pliers and smile. ‘What pains no longer remains,’ he’d announce happily. Except sometimes he’d say, ‘Oops, wrong tooth, let’s start again.’ Maybe they were proper dentist teeth extractors but we called them his horse pliers because they were definitely not the same as those used by the Government dentist.
    Once when Doctor Dyke took out one of my teeth he did his ‘Oops, wrong tooth’ routine and I started to cry.
    â€˜Never mind,’ Mevrou said. ‘Everybody can make a mistake and the doctor is only doing his best and does this for nothing out of the goodness of his heart, so crying is not a very grateful thing to do, you hear?’
    I tried to stop blubbing but the extraction hurt like hell and I was swallowing a lot of blood and feeling sick and I was going to have to go through it all over again. Mevrou soon grew impatient with my sniffing. ‘ Ag , we all got to learn to take a bit of pain in our life, Thomas. Just think of the Lord Jesus hanging from the cross. He’s got six-inch nails through his hands and a sword from a Roman soldier stuck in his side and he has to suck a sponge full of vinegar. That’s what you call pain, man! Compared to that, what we got here is just a little bit of hurt from a tooth.’ It was okay for her, she didn’t have any teeth, so how would she know?
    When you were sixteen and could leave the place and be in the outside world, you could always tell an orphan from The Boys Farm because the only teeth he still had were the ones growing in the back of the jaw where Doctor Dyke couldn’t get at them. It is very hard to look intelligent when you’ve only got empty gums in your mouth. So, if you could stand the pain, you’d hang on until the Government dentist arrived, because if things were really bad he’d give you an injection so it only hurt after, when the needle wore off, and besides, it was about a quarter of the pain or even less than a Doctor Dyke leather-chair-horse-pliers-extraction.
    The morning after the night before when Pissy Vermaak had warned me in the wash house that he hadn’t forgotten me hitting him passed without incident. It was only when we got back from school that the trouble started. As I always did on my return I put my pencil case safely away. If you lost it the Government got very angry because it was ‘Government Goods Department of Education’, that is what our teacher told us it said on the back of the box. I waited until no one was looking and ran to the big rock that was a long way from the hostel building and quite deep in some bush. There were quite a lot of thorn bushes around so nobody ever went there except me because I knew a path through the thorns. I’d found it when I was quite little and had decided to run away. I had just walked and walked and when I got to this big rock I decided to take a rest and the rest made me change my mind because the situation was hopeless. But I knew I’d found a place I could come when I was miserable, which was quite a lot of the time. Now it was Tinker’s home and no longer a place to come when you were sad.
    Whenever I got close