Scenes from Provincial Life Page 13

  The secret behind the telephone call, and behind his mother’s smile, is revealed at the mid-morning break, when Mr Gouws motions him to stay behind. There is a false air about Mr Gouws too, a friendliness he mistrusts.

  Mr Gouws wants him to come to tea at his home. Dumbly he nods and memorizes the address.

  This is not something he wants. Not that he dislikes Mr Gouws. If he does not trust him as much as he trusted Mrs Sanderson in Standard Four, that is only because Mr Gouws is a man, the first male teacher he has had, and he is wary of something that breathes from all men: a restlessness, a roughness barely curbed, a hint of pleasure in cruelty. He does not know how to behave towards Mr Gouws or towards men in general: whether to offer no resistance and court their approval, or to maintain a barrier of stiffness. Women are easier because they are kinder. But Mr Gouws – he cannot deny it – is as fair as a person can be. His command of English is good, and he seems to bear no grudge against the English or against boys from Afrikaans families who try to be English. During one of his many absences from school Mr Gouws taught the parsing of complements-of-the-predicate. He has trouble catching up with the class on complements-of-the-predicate. If complements-of-the-predicate made no sense, like idioms, then the other boys would also be having trouble with them. But the other boys, or most of them, seem to have attained an easy command of complements-of-the-predicate. The conclusion cannot be escaped: Mr Gouws knows something about English grammar that he does not.

  Mr Gouws uses the cane as much as any other teacher. But the punishment he favours, when the class has been too noisy for too long, is to order them to put down their pens, shut their books, clasp their hands behind their heads, close their eyes, and sit absolutely still.

  Save for Mr Gouws’s footfalls as he patrols up and down the rows, there is absolute silence in the room. From the eucalyptus trees around the quadrangle comes the tranquil cooing of doves. This is a punishment he could endure forever, with equanimity: the doves, the soft breathing of the boys around him.

  Disa Road, where Mr Gouws lives, is also in Reunion Park, in the new, northern extension of the township where he has never explored. Not only does Mr Gouws live in Reunion Park and cycle to school on a bicycle with fat tyres: he has a wife, a plain, dark woman, and, even more surprising, two small children. This he discovers in the living room of 11 Disa Road, where there are scones and a pot of tea waiting on the table, and where, as he had feared, he is at last left alone with Mr Gouws, having to make desperate, false conversation.

  It gets even worse. Mr Gouws – who has put aside his tie and jacket for shorts and khaki socks – is trying to pretend to him that, now that the school year is over, now that he is about to leave Worcester, the two of them can be friends. In fact he is trying to suggest that they have been friends all year: the teacher and the cleverest boy, the class leader.

  He grows flustered and stiff. Mr Gouws offers him a second scone, which he refuses. ‘Come on!’ says Mr Gouws, and smiles, and puts it on his plate anyway. He longs to be away.

  He had wanted to leave Worcester with everything in order. He had been prepared to give Mr Gouws a place in his memory beside Mrs Sanderson: not quite with her, but close to her. Now Mr Gouws is spoiling it. He wishes he wouldn’t.

  The second scone sits on the plate uneaten. He will pretend no more: he grows mute and stubborn. ‘Must you go?’ says Mr Gouws. He nods. Mr Gouws rises and accompanies him to the front gate, which is a copy of the gate at 12 Poplar Avenue, the hinges whining on exactly the same high note.

  At least Mr Gouws has the sense not to make him shake hands or do something else stupid.

  They are leaving Worcester. His father has decided that his future does not after all lie with Standard Canners, which, according to him, is on its way down. He is going to return to legal practice.

  There is a farewell party for him at his office, from which he returns with a new watch. Shortly thereafter he sets off for Cape Town by himself, leaving his mother behind to supervise the moving. She hires a contractor named Retief, striking a bargain that for fifteen pounds he will convey not only the furniture but the three of them too, in the cab of his van.

  Retief’s men load the van; his mother and brother climb aboard. He makes a last dash around the empty house, saying goodbye. Behind the front door is the umbrella stand that usually holds two golf clubs and a walking stick but is now empty. ‘They’ve left the umbrella stand!’ he shouts. ‘Come!’ calls his mother – ‘Forget that old umbrella stand!’ ‘No!’ he shouts back, and will not leave until the men have loaded the umbrella stand. ‘Dis net ’n ou stuk pyp,’ grumbles Retief – It’s just an old piece of pipe.

  So he learns that what he thought was an umbrella stand is nothing but a metre length of concrete sewer-pipe that his mother has painted green. This is what they are taking with them to Cape Town, along with the cushion covered in dog-hairs that Cossack used to sleep on, and the rolled-up netting-wire from the chicken-coop, and the machine that throws cricket balls, and the wooden stave with the Morse code. Labouring up Bain’s Kloof Pass, Retief’s van feels like Noah’s Ark, bearing into the future the sticks and stones of their old life.

  In Reunion Park they had paid twelve pounds a month for their house. The house his father has rented in Plumstead costs twenty-five pounds. It lies at the very limit of Plumstead, facing an expanse of sand and wattle bush where only a week after their arrival the police find a dead baby in a brown paper packet. A half-hour walk in the other direction lies Plumstead railway station. The house itself is newly built, like all the houses in Evremonde Road, with picture windows and parquet floors. The doors are warped, the locks do not lock, there is a pile of rubble in the backyard.

  Next door live a couple newly arrived from England. The man is forever washing his car; the woman, wearing red shorts and sunglasses, spends her days in a deckchair sunning her long white legs.

  The immediate task is to find schools for him and his brother. Cape Town is not like Worcester, where all the boys went to the boys’ school and all the girls to the girls’ school. In Cape Town there are schools to choose among, some of them good schools, some not. To get into a good school you need contacts, and they have few contacts.

  Through the influence of his mother’s brother Lance they get an interview at Rondebosch Boys’ High. Dressed neatly in his shorts and shirt and tie and navy-blue blazer with the Worcester Boys’ Primary badge on the breast pocket, he sits with his mother on a bench outside the headmaster’s office. When their turn comes they are ushered into a wood-panelled room full of photographs of rugby and cricket teams. The headmaster’s questions are all addressed to his mother: where they live, what his father does. Then comes the moment he has been waiting for. From her handbag she produces the report that proves he was first in class and that ought therefore to open all doors to him.

  The headmaster puts on his reading-glasses. ‘So you came first in your class,’ he says. ‘Good, good! But you won’t find it so easy here.’

  He had hoped to be tested: to be asked the date of the battle of Blood River, or, even better, to be given some mental arithmetic. But that is all, the interview is over. ‘I can make no promises,’ says the headmaster. ‘His name will go down on the waiting list, then we must hope for a withdrawal.’

  His name goes down on the waiting lists of three schools, with no success. Coming first in Worcester is evidently not good enough for Cape Town.

  The last resort is the Catholic school, St Joseph’s. St Joseph’s has no waiting list: they will take anyone prepared to pay their fees, which for non-Catholics are twelve pounds a quarter.

  What is being brought home to them, to him and his mother, is that in Cape Town different classes of people attend different schools. St Joseph’s caters for, if not the lowest class, then the second lowest. Her failure to get him into a better school leaves his mother bitter but does not affect him. He is not sure what class they belong to, where they fit in. For the present he is content merely to
get by. The threat of being sent to an Afrikaans school and consigned to an Afrikaans life has receded – that is all that matters. He can relax. He does not even have to go on pretending to be a Catholic.

  The real English do not go to a school like St Joseph’s. On the streets of Rondebosch, on their way to and from their own schools, he can see the real English every day, can admire their straight blond hair and golden skins, their clothes that are never too small or too large, their quiet confidence. They josh each other (a word he knows from the public-school stories he has read) in an easy way, without the raucousness and clumsiness he is used to. He has no aspiration to join them, but he watches closely and tries to learn.

  The boys from Diocesan College, who are the most English of all and do not condescend even to play rugby or cricket against St Joseph’s, live in select areas that, being far from the railway line, he hears of but never sees: Bishopscourt, Fernwood, Constantia. They have sisters who go to schools like Herschel and St Cyprian’s, whom they genially watch over and protect. In Worcester he had rarely laid eyes on a girl: his friends seemed always to have brothers, not sisters. Now he glimpses for the first time the sisters of the English, so golden-blonde, so beautiful, that he cannot believe they are of this earth.

  To be in time for school at 8.30 he needs to leave home by 7.30: a half-hour walk to the station, a fifteen-minute ride in the train, a five-minute walk from station to school, and a ten-minute cushion in case of delays. However, because he is nervous of being late, he leaves home at 7.00 and is at school by 8.00. There, in the classroom just unlocked by the janitor, he can sit at his desk with his head on his arms and wait.

  He has nightmares of misreading his watch face, missing trains, taking wrong turns. In his nightmares he weeps in helpless despair.

  The only boys who get to school before him are the De Freitas brothers, whose father, a greengrocer, drops them off at the crack of dawn from his battered blue truck, on his way to the Salt River produce market.

  The teachers at St Joseph’s belong to the Marist order. To him these Brothers, in their severe black cassocks and white starched stocks, are special people. Their air of mystery impresses him: the mystery of where they come from, the mystery of the names they have cast off. He does not like it when Brother Augustine, the cricket coach, comes to practice wearing a white shirt and black trousers and cricket boots like an ordinary person. He particularly does not like it when Brother Augustine, taking a turn to bat, slips a protector, a ‘box,’ under his trousers.

  He does not know what the Brothers do when they are not teaching. The wing of the school building where they sleep and eat and live their private lives is off limits; he has no wish to penetrate it. He would like to think they live austere lives there, rising at four in the morning, spending hours in prayer, eating frugally, darning their own socks. When they behave badly, he does his best to excuse them. When Brother Alexis, for instance, who is fat and unshaven, breaks wind uncouthly and falls asleep in the Afrikaans class, he explains it to himself by saying that Brother Alexis is an intelligent man who finds teaching beneath him. When Brother Jean-Pierre is suddenly transferred from duty in the junior dormitory amid stories that he has been doing things to small boys, he simply puts the stories out of his mind. It is inconceivable to him that Brothers should have sexual desires and not withstand them.

  Since few of the Brothers speak English as a first language, they have hired a Catholic layman to take the English classes. Mr Whelan is Irish: he hates the English and barely conceals his dislike of Protestants. He also makes no effort to pronounce Afrikaans names correctly, speaking them with lips distastefully pursed as though they were heathen gibberish.

  Most of their time in English classes is spent on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Mr Whelan’s method is to assign the boys roles and have them read their parts aloud. They also do exercises out of the grammar textbook and, once a week, write an essay. They have thirty minutes to write the essay before handing it in; since he does not believe in taking work home, Mr Whelan uses the remaining ten minutes to mark the essays. His ten-minute marking sessions have become one of his pièces de résistance, watched by the boys with admiring smiles. Blue pencil poised, Mr Whelan skims swiftly through the pile of scripts, then shuffles them together and passes them to the class monitor. There is a subdued, ironic ripple of applause.

  Mr Whelan’s first name is Terence. He wears a brown leather motoring jacket and a hat. When it is cold he keeps his hat on indoors. He rubs his pale white hands together to warm them; he has the bloodless face of a corpse. What he is doing in South Africa, why he is not back in Ireland, is not clear. He seems to disapprove of the country and everything in it.

  For Mr Whelan he writes essays on The Character of Mark Antony, on The Character of Brutus, on Road Safety, on Sport, on Nature. Most of his essays are dull, mechanical performances; but occasionally he feels a spurt of excitement as he writes, and the pen begins to fly over the page. In one of his essays a highwayman waits under cover at the roadside. His horse snorts softly, its breath turns to vapour in the cold night air. A ray of moonlight falls like a slash across his face; he holds his pistol under the flap of his coat to keep the powder dry.

  The highwayman makes no impression on Mr Whelan. Mr Whelan’s pale eyes flicker across the page, his pencil comes down: 61⁄2. 61⁄2 is the mark he almost always gets for his essays; never more than 7. Boys with English names get 71⁄2 or 8. Despite his funny surname, a boy named Theo Stavropoulos gets 8, because he dresses well and takes elocution lessons. Theo is also always allotted the part of Mark Antony, which means that he gets to read out ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’ the most famous speech in the play.

  In Worcester he had gone to school in a state of apprehension but of excitement too. True, he might at any time be exposed as a liar, with terrible consequences. Yet school was fascinating: each day seemed to bring new revelations of the cruelty and pain and hatred raging beneath the everyday surface of things. What was going on was wrong, he knew, should not be allowed to happen; furthermore he was too young, too babyish and vulnerable, for what he was being exposed to. Nevertheless, the passion and fury of those Worcester days gripped him; he was shocked but he was greedy too to see more, to see all there was to see.

  In Cape Town, by contrast, he feels he is wasting his time. School is no longer a place where great passions are aired. It is a shrunken little world, a more or less benign prison in which he might as well be weaving baskets as going through the classroom routine. Cape Town is not making him cleverer, it is making him stupider. The realization causes panic to well up in him. Whoever he truly is, whoever the true ‘I’ is that ought to be rising out of the ashes of his childhood, is not being allowed to be born, is being kept puny and stunted.

  He has this feeling most despairingly in Mr Whelan’s classes. There is a great deal more that he can write than Mr Whelan will ever allow. Writing for Mr Whelan is not like stretching one’s wings; on the contrary, it is like huddling in a ball, making oneself as small and inoffensive as one can.

  He has no wish to write about sport (mens sana in corpore sano) or road safety, which are so boring that he has to force out the words. He does not even want to write about highwaymen: he has a sense that the slivers of moonlight that fall across their faces and the white knuckles that grip their pistol-butts, whatever momentary impression they may make, do not come from him but from somewhere else, and arrive already wilted, stale. What he would write if he could, if it were not Mr Whelan who would read it, would be something darker, something that, once it began to flow from his pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky.

  To Mr Whelan is also allotted the task of keeping the non-Catholic boys of Standard Six busy while the Catholic boys are in catechism class. Mr Whelan is supposed to read the Gospel of St Luke with them, or the Acts of the Apostles. Instead
they hear from him stories about Parnell and Roger Casement and the perfidy of the English, over and over again. On some days he comes to class bearing the day’s Cape Times, boiling with rage at the newest outrages of the Russians in their satellite countries. ‘In their schools they have created classes in atheism where children are forced to spit on Our Saviour,’ he thunders. ‘Can you believe it? And those poor children who remain true to their faith are sent off to the infamous prison camps of Siberia. That is the reality of Communism, which has the impudence to call itself the religion of Man.’

  From Mr Whelan they hear news of Russia, from Brother Otto about the persecution of the faithful in China. Brother Otto is not like Mr Whelan: he is quiet, blushes easily, has to be coaxed into telling stories. But his stories have more authority because he has actually been in China. ‘Yes, I have seen it with my own eyes,’ he says in his stumbling English: ‘people in a tiny cell, locked up, so many that they could not breathe any more, and died. I have seen it.’

  Ching-Chong-Chinaman, the boys call Brother Otto behind his back. To them, what Brother Otto has to say about China or Mr Whelan about Russia is no more real than Jan van Riebeeck or the Great Trek. In fact, since Jan van Riebeeck and the Trek are on the Standard Six syllabus while Communism is not, what goes on in China and Russia may as well be ignored. China and Russia are just excuses to get Brother Otto or Mr Whelan talking.

  As for him, he is confused. He knows that his teachers’ stories must be lies – Communists are good, why would they behave so cruelly? – but he has no means of proving it. He is incensed at having to sit captive listening to them, but prudent enough not to protest or even demur. He has read the Cape Times himself, he knows what happens to Communist sympathizers. He has no wish to be denounced as a fellow-traveller and ostracized.

  Though Mr Whelan is less than enthusiastic about teaching Scripture to the non-Catholics, he cannot entirely neglect the Gospels. ‘Unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other,’ he reads from Luke. ‘What does Jesus mean? Does he mean that we should refuse to stand up for ourselves? Does he mean that we should be namby-pambies? Of course not. But if a bully comes up to you spoiling for a fight, Jesus says: Don’t be provoked. There are better ways of settling differences than by fisticuffs.