Frankie & Stankie by Barbara Trapido

Dinah and Lisa are growing up in 1950s South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. They are two little girls from a liberal family – big sister Lisa is strong and sensible, while Dinah is weedy and arty. At school, the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones provides instruction in mental arithmetic and racial prejudice. And then there’s the puzzle of lunch break. ‘Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie to make your sandwiches?’ a classmate asks. But Dinah doesn’t know, because it’s her dad who makes them. As the shadows of apartheid lengthen, Dinah journeys through childhood and adolescence and the minefields of boys and university in this vibrant and irresistible novel.

Frankie & Stankie is a book which covers all of the normal aspects of growing up. Dinah is desperate to be popular (more popular than Lisa anyway). She tries to wear what everyone else is wearing; she is cheeky to her teachers and does minimal work at school until she is facing the prospect of an exam; and she tries to annoy Lisa as much as she can.

The backdrop to all of this, however, is apartheid South Africa. Dinah observes a drip-feed of prejudices within her class and in the wider community, some subtle and some less so. As she gets older she sees increasing division between herself and her classmates, some of which becomes so normalised that nobody around her even thinks to question them.

Although they are white, Dinah’s family is familiar with prejudice as her parents have emigrated to South Africa from Nazi-occupied Europe. The book dives into the characters’ backstories, including those of Dinah’s parents and various friends. Parallels are easily drawn between the racial and ethnic prejudice in 1930s Europe and 1950s South Africa and each character’s roots shows how they have been shaped by their past experiences. Dinah’s parents’ turbulent history helps them to resist engaging in the spirit of the apartheid as much as their neighbours and their daughters’ teachers.

In my view, on a micro-level the way the story is told is a realistic portrayal of how life evolves. Dinah befriends particular people at school who then leave; Dinah makes a new friend and the old one fades into the past. These friends’ unresolved storylines are true to life, with people fading gradually or suddenly in and out of all of our lives, and life still moving on.

On a macro-level, this is an amusing and light-hearted portrayal of girls growing up in a minefield of social expectation in a rapidly changing world.