Bryce Courtenay - The Power of One (Young Readers Condensed Edition)

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Smoky Joes Caf
Four Fires
Matthew Flinders Cat

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Published by Laurel-Leaf an imprint of Random House Childrens Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 1989 by Bryce Courtenay

All rights reserved.

Unabridged version first published in hardcover in Australia by William Heinemann in 1989. Condensed version originally published in hardcover in Australia by Penguin Books Ltd, Sydney, in 1999. This edition published by arrangement with Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

Laurel-Leaf and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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RL: 5.8
eISBN: 978-0-307-78684-5
July 2007

v3.1

For
M AUDE J ASMINE G REER AND E DNA M URPHY .
Here is the book I promised
you so long ago.

This is what happened.

My Zulu nanny was a person made for laughter, warmth and softness and before my life started properly she would clasp me to her breasts and stroke my golden curls with a hand so large it seemed to contain my whole head. My hurts were soothed with a song about a brave young warrior hunting a lion and a womens song about doing the washing down on the rock beside the river where, at sunset, the baboons would come out of the hills to drink.

My life proper started at the age of five when my mother had her nervous breakdown. I was torn from my black nanny with her big white smile and taken from my grandfathers farm and sent to boarding school.

Then began a time of yellow wedges of pumpkin burned black and bitter at the edges; mashed potato with glassy lumps; meat aproned with gristle in gray gravy; diced carrots; warm, wet, flatulent cabbage; beds that wet themselves in the morning; and an entirely new sensation called loneliness.

I was the youngest child in the school by two years and spoke only English while the other children spoke Afrikaans, the language of the Boers, which was the name for the Dutch settlers in South Africa. They called the English settlers Rooinecks, which means Redneck, because in the Boer War, which had happened forty years before between the English and the Dutch settlers, the pale-skinned English troopers got very sunburned and their necks turned bright red.

The English won this war, but it was a terrible struggle and it created a hatred for them by the Boers, which was carried over into the generations that followed. So, here I was, someone who only spoke the language of the people they hated most of all in the world. I was the first Rooineck the Afrikaner kids had ever seen and, Im telling you, I was in a lot of trouble.

On the first night of boarding school, I was taken by two eleven-year-olds to the seniors dormitory, to stand trial. I stood there shaking like billy-o and gibbering, unable to understand the language of the twelve-year-old judge, or the reason for the hilarity when the sentence was pronounced. But I guessed the worst. I had been caught deep behind enemy lines and even a five-year-old knows this means the death sentence.

I wasnt quite sure what death was. I knew it was something that happened on the farm in the slaughterhouse to pigs and goats and an occasional heifer and Id seen it happen often enough to chickens. The squeal from the pigs was so awful that I knew it wasnt much of an experience, even for pigs.

And I knew something else for sure; death wasnt as good as life. Now death was about to happen to me before I could really get the hang of life. Trying hard to hold back my tears, I was dragged off to the shower room. I had never been in a shower room before; it resembled the slaughterhouse on my grandfathers farm and I guessed this was where my death would take place. I was told to remove my pajamas and to kneel inside the recess facing the wall. I looked down into the hole in the floor where all the blood would drain away. I closed my eyes and said a silent, sobbing prayer. My prayer wasnt to God but to my nanny. I felt a sudden splash on my neck and then warm blood trickled over my trembling body. Funny, I didnt feel dead. But who knows what dead feels like?

When the Judge and his council of war had all pissed on me, they left. After a while it got very quiet, just a drip, drip from someplace overhead. I didnt know how to turn the shower on and so had no way of washing myself. At the farm I had always been bathed by my nanny in a tin tub in front of the kitchen stove. Shed soap me all over and Dee and Dum, the two kitchen maids who were twins, would giggle behind their hands when she soaped my little acorn. This was how I knew it was a special part of me. Just how special I was soon to find out. I tried to dry myself with my pajamas. My hands were shaking a lot. I wandered around that big dark place until I found the small kids dormitory. There I crept under my blanket and came to the end of my first day in life.

I awoke next morning to find the other kids surrounding my bed and holding their noses. Im telling you, I have to admit it myself, I smelt worse than a kaffir toilet, worse than the pigs at home. The kids scattered as a very large person with a smudge of dark hair above her lip entered. It was the same lady who had left me in the dormitory the night before. Good morning, Mevrou! they chorused in Afrikaans, each standing stiffly to attention at the foot of his bed.

The huge woman tore back my blanket and sniffed. Why, you wet your bed, boy! Sis, man, you stink! she bellowed. Then, without waiting for my answer, which, of course, I didnt have, she grabbed me by the ear and led me back to the place where theyd pissed on me the night before. Making me take off my pajamas, she pushed me into a recess. I thought desperately, Shes even bigger than Nanny. If she pisses on me I will surely drown. There was a sudden hissing sound and needles of icy water drilled into me. I had my eyes tightly shut but the hail of water was remorseless.

If you dont know what a shower is, and have never had one before, then its not so hard to believe that maybe this is death. A thousand sharp pricks drilled into my skin. How can so much piss possibly come out of one person, I thought. Funny, it should be warm, but this was icy cold, but then I was no expert on these things.

Then the fierce hissing and the icy deluge stopped suddenly. I opened my eyes to find no Mevrou. The Judge stood before me, his pajama sleeve rolled up, his arm wet where hed reached to turn off the shower. Behind him stood the jury and all the small kids from my dormitory.