And so we settled into a routine, lessons in the morning while our Afrikaans friends worked the farm, then all of us merging into a carefree gang spending our summer afternoons at the stream, or on walks looking for caves, or just wending our way up into the mountains. Darkness came suddenly in those mountains, and we had to be careful not to delay our returns too long. (Mr De Jaager had made it clear quite early on that returning after dark would result in unpleasant consequences.) The evenings inside were cozy. The Afrikaans government had banned TV as a decadent influence, so the evenings were filled with games, chatting, reading comics, and listening to Springbok Radio.
On our third weekend, Mrs De Jaager said we had all been invited to go with her to visit her sister's family. We boys all crowded into the back of the truck (no seat belt laws back then) and lurched along the dirt road to the sister's farm, about a 45-minute drive away through the valley. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by a youngish woman with her hair in a bun and a lean man with a serious face. Twin nine-year-old boys hovered nearby.
The Van Rensburgs (for that was their name) invited us in. It was a rambling, rustic farm house with a large open living area cluttered with stuffed chairs, sofas and tables. We boys soon went back outside where there was a ping-pong table, leaving the adults to chat inside. A boy of about 16, apparently a farm hand, pottered around nearby while we played at the table. By and by, the four adults emerged from the house and announced that they were going over to the General Store near the other house and would be back in a few hours. The farm hand, introduced to us as Cobus, was put in charge.
We soon moved on to a variation of the ping pong game, in which you hit the ball and ran round to the other side of the table. In the course of that feverish running, I twisted my ankle as I rounded the table – not severely, but enough to cause me to yelp and announce that I needed to rest it. I sat on a wooden crate while the others finished the game. In due course, all of us went inside, me hobbling.
About mid-afternoon, dark clouds started to gather, and it looked like a summer storm was brewing. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder and hail started to fall, then it turned to sheets of cascading rain, and within a half hour great rivers of muddy water were rushing down the dirt road. "Ag, man, they'll have trouble getting back here today," said Cobus, looking out of the window. I could sense why. The road was starting to look impassable. This was not the steady gentle rain of two weekends ago--it was a downpour that seemed to go on and on.
There was not a whole lot to do inside, and everyone started to get restless. The twins suddenly produced a rugby ball, which everyone started throwing to each other, except me, who was still nursing my ankle, and Cobus, who was apparently above all that. Throwing in place became throwing and stepping back, which became throwing and running, and Cobus bye-and-bye called for order. No one paid attention, especially the twins, who very quickly ended up crashing into each other and then falling all over each other onto a table, from which a vulnerable lamp teetered and then fell helplessly to the floor.
"What did I tell you!?" snapped Cobus. He grabbed each twin by the arm and pulled them over to the sofa. Then he sat down and hauled them over his lap, yanked down their shorts (no underwear in sight) and in short order had them teetering side-by-side across his lap, bare cheeks up, arms and legs dangling at opposite ends. I was amazed that he was allowed to do this, but I guessed this was not the first time he had been put in charge, and he seemed to have sweeping authority to enforce obedience. The twins dangled over his lap in stillness. The faintest smile seemed to play around the edges of Cobus' mouth-- it did not appear that what he was about to do would hurt him more than them. He rested his hand on one cheek for a moment, then raised it and brought it down with an experimental smack. The cheek shuddered and a muted "ow" came from over the horizon. Then the hand started to systematically smack each of the four cheeks in turn, from close to his stomach to the edge of his knees, then back again, rhythmically and ceaselessly, until the "ow's" became louder and finally spilled over into yelps as the soft little buttocks reddened and bucked and wriggled. The whole time, what I fancied to be the faintest glimmer hovered around Cobus's mouth, and into his eyes.
Eventually he allowed the twins up and they grabbed their bums and stood abjectly stamping their feet, apparently unconcerned with their nakedness.
The rest of us were too absorbed by the spectacle to notice Cobus leave and return with a wide leather strap.
"The rest of you – pants down and bend over the back of that sofa – except for you," he said to me, "since you were the only one who wasn't running around."
The others looked stunned and glanced round at each other. The three De Jaager boys, after a slight hesitation, yielded to the stern voice of authority--relatively young though that voice was--and proceeded to approach the sofa as directed. Reluctantly, the English-speaking boys accompanied them to the back of the long, overstuffed sofa; the Afrikaans boys pulled down their pants and underwear, and bent over the high back with their faces and hands on the cushions, their bums automatically jacked up into the air; and the others soon followed suit. Eight bottoms were arched vulnerably upwards, a few with the faint stripes of earlier canings from the De Jaagers—quite a sight. Some were round, others narrow, some small, others quite protruberant. Cobus snapped the strap a few times across the palm of his hand, then proceeded to walk up and down swinging the strap, loud claps ringing out as he did so, and it was quite a sight seeing those fleshy bums writhing and bucking and reddening under the assault while a chorus of yells emerged from their owners. All the while, Cobus kept that same expression. I myself was happy to endure the discomfort of a mildly twisted ankle in place of the sting the others were clearly enduring, and it was clearly no picnic, for the bottoms in due course had broad angry bands, darkening to purple, overlaying the redness that the initial wallops had produced.
Eventually, doubtless reluctantly, Cobus ended the session and ordered everyone up. They got up very slowly. Some proceeded to stoop over, others leaned backwards, and still others twisted around on their feet as they all tried to rub the maddening sting out of their tails.
The twinge in my ankle was really quite mild by comparison and I must say I felt quite smug, as well as a little stimulated by the spectacle I had witnessed.
About an hour later the rain lessened, and some time after that the phone rang.
Cobus answered. It was Mr De Jaager saying that the four parents had decided to stay over at the De Jaagers' house for the night because of the condition of the roads, and inquiring as to whether everything was all right.
Cobus replied that everything was quiet, which by then it was.
Everyone started to help themselves to food out of the fridge and off the counter tops, but few ventured to sit down, except for the twins, who had not had to endure the strap.
Cobus remarked over dinner that at his school there were twins who were so alike that only their parents could tell them apart, and they had no compunction about trying to frame each other if a caning was due. He said that once when they were 11 or 12, one of the twins had skipped rugby practice after school, been caught leaving the school premises by a teacher, and had blandly given the name of the other twin when questioned. The following day the teacher had called for the innocent twin and hauled him to his office, ordered him to bend over, and soundly caned him. The teacher had not bothered with an explanation as to why he was caning the boy, for he assumed it was the lad he had confronted after school the previous day, who surely would remember why he was in trouble. As for the young innocent, he did not demand an explanation. At that school no boy dared demand anything from any teacher.
Others piped up with their own school tales about school tails, and so the evening wound down, and everyone went to bed. The following day dawned bright and clear and warm, and everyone went swimming nude in a pond near the house, their bottoms splotched and blackened and broadly branded from the previous evening's exercises, except for mine and Cobus's. At 16, his own bottom was white, soft, smooth and shapely, and I wondered if he still got caned at school. He didn't seem to mind being the only adolescent there, swimming with nothing on like the pre-adolecents.
By lunchtime we were all dressed and the four parents had made it back. Cobus had ceased to pay attention to us and was going about assorted farm work. The nine visiting boys clambered into the back of the De Jaagers' truck and it rattled off, the boys glad that the still-muddy road lessened the jolting, for sitting was not yet easy for the majority of the passengers, and a jolting van would have been deeply felt in everyone's seat, save my own.
To be continued........