Scenes from Provincial Life Page 7

  Josias is the fourth Native he has known in his life. The first, whom he remembers only dimly as wearing blue pyjamas all day long, was the boy who used to mop the stairs of the block of flats they lived in in Johannesburg. The second was Fiela in Plettenberg Bay, who took in their washing. Fiela was very black and very old and had no teeth and made long speeches about the past in beautiful, rolling English. She came from St Helena, she said, where she had been a slave. The third was also in Plettenberg Bay. There had been a great storm; a ship had sunk; the wind, which had blown for days and nights, was just beginning to die down. He and his mother and his brother were out on the beach inspecting the mounds of jetsam and seaweed that had been washed up, when an old man with a grey beard and a clerical collar, carrying an umbrella, came up to them and addressed them. ‘Man builds great boats of iron,’ said the old man, ‘but the sea is stronger. The sea is stronger than anything man can build.’

  When they were alone again, his mother had said: ‘You must remember what he said. He was a wise old man.’ It is the only time he can remember her using the word wise; in fact it is the only time he can remember anyone using the word outside of books. But it is not just the old-fashioned word that impresses him. It is possible to respect Natives – that is what she is saying. It is a great relief to hear that, to have it confirmed.

  In the stories that have left the deepest mark on him, it is the third brother, the humblest and most derided, who, after the first and second brothers have disdainfully passed by, helps the old woman to carry her heavy load or draws the thorn from the lion’s paw. The third brother is kind and honest and courageous while the first and second brothers are boastful, arrogant, uncharitable. At the end of the story the third brother is crowned prince, while the first and second brothers are disgraced and sent packing.

  There are white people and Coloured people and Natives, of whom the Natives are the lowest and most derided. The parallel is inescapable: the Natives are the third brother.

  At school they learn, over and over again, year after year, about Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel and Lord Charles Somerset and Piet Retief. After Piet Retief come the Kaffir Wars, when the Kaffirs poured over the borders of the Colony and had to be driven back; but the Kaffir Wars are so many and so confused and so hard to keep apart that they are not required to know them for examinations.

  Although, in examinations, he gives the correct answers to the history questions, he does not know, in a way that satisfies his heart, why Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel were so good while Lord Charles Somerset was so bad. Nor does he like the leaders of the Great Trek as he is supposed to, except perhaps for Piet Retief, who was murdered after Dingaan tricked him into leaving his gun outside the kraal. Andries Pretorius and Gerrit Maritz and the others sound like the teachers in the high school or like Afrikaners on the radio: angry and obdurate and full of menaces and talk about God.

  They do not cover the Boer War at school, at least not in English-medium classes. There are rumours that the Boer War is taught in the Afrikaans classes, under the name of the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, the Second War of Liberation, but not for examination. Being a touchy subject, the Boer War is not officially on the syllabus. Even his parents will not say anything about the Boer War, about who was right and who was wrong. However, his mother does repeat a story about the Boer War that her own mother told her. When the Boers arrived on their farm, said her mother, they demanded food and money and expected to be waited on. When the British soldiers came, they slept in the stable, stole nothing, and before leaving courteously thanked their hosts.

  The British, with their haughty, arrogant generals, are the villains of the Boer War. They are also stupid, for wearing red uniforms that make them easy targets for the Boer marksmen. In stories of the War one is supposed to side with the Boers, fighting for their freedom against the might of the British Empire. However, he prefers to dislike the Boers, not only for their long beards and ugly clothes, but for hiding behind rocks and shooting from ambush, and to like the British for marching to their death to the skirl of bagpipes.

  In Worcester the English are a minority, in Reunion Park a tiny minority. Aside from himself and his brother, who are English only in a way, there are only two proper English boys: Rob Hart and a small, wiry boy named Billy Smith whose father works on the railways and who has a sickness that makes his skin flake off (his mother forbids him to touch any of the Smith children).

  When he lets it slip that Rob Hart is being flogged by Miss Oosthuizen, his parents seem at once to know why. Miss Oosthuizen is one of the Oosthuizen clan, who are Nationalists; Rob Hart’s father, who owns a hardware store, was a United Party town councillor until the elections of 1948.

  His parents shake their heads over Miss Oosthuizen. They regard her as excitable, unstable; they disapprove of her hennaed hair. Under Smuts, his father says, something would have been done about a teacher who brought politics into school. His father is also United Party. In fact his father lost his job in Cape Town, the job with the title his mother was so proud of – Controller of Letting – when Malan beat Smuts in 1948. It was because of Malan that they had to leave the house in Rosebank that he looks back on with such longing, the house with the big overgrown garden and the observatory with the domed roof and the two cellars, had to leave Rosebank Junior School and his Rosebank friends, and come here to Worcester. In Cape Town his father used to set off to work in the mornings wearing a dapper double-breasted suit, carrying a leather attaché case. When other children asked what his father did, he could reply, ‘He is Controller of Letting,’ and they would fall respectfully silent. In Worcester his father’s work has no name. ‘My father works for Standard Canners,’ he has to say. ‘But what does he do?’ ‘He is in the office, he keeps the books,’ he has to say, lamely. He has no idea what ‘keeping books’ means.

  Standard Canners produces canned Alberta peaches, canned Bartlett pears and canned apricots. Standard Canners cans more peaches than any other canner in the country: that is all it is famous for.

  Despite the defeat of 1948 and the death of General Smuts, his father remains loyal to the United Party: loyal but gloomy. Advocate Strauss, the new leader of the United Party, is only a pale shadow of Smuts; under Strauss the UP has no hope of winning the next election. Furthermore, the Nats are assuring themselves of victory by redrawing the boundaries of constituencies to favour their supporters in the platteland, the countryside.

  ‘Why don’t they do something about it?’ he asks his father.

  ‘Who?’ says his father. ‘Who can stop them? They can do what they like, now that they are in power.’

  He does not see the point of having elections if the party that wins can change the rules. It is like the batsman deciding who may and who may not bowl.

  His father switches on the radio at news-time but really only to listen to the scores, cricket scores in the summer, rugby scores in the winter.

  The news bulletin used once to come from England, before the Nats took over. First there would be ‘God Save the King,’ then there would be the six pips from Greenwich, then the announcer would say, ‘This is London, here is the news,’ and would read news from all over the world. Now all that is finished. ‘This is the South African Broadcasting Corporation,’ says the announcer, and plunges into a long recital of what Dr Malan said in Parliament.

  What he hates most about Worcester, what most makes him want to escape, is the rage and resentment that he senses crackling through the Afrikaans boys. He fears and loathes the hulking, barefoot Afrikaans boys in their tight short trousers, particularly the older boys, who, given half a chance, will take you off to some quiet place in the veld and violate you in ways he has heard leeringly alluded to – borsel you, for instance, which as far as he can work out means pulling down your pants and brushing shoe polish into your balls (but why your balls? why shoe polish?) and sending you home through the streets half-naked and blubbering.

  There is a lore that all Afrikaans bo
ys seem to share, spread by the student teachers who visit the school, to do with initiation and what happens to you during initiation. The Afrikaans boys whisper about it in the same excited way that they talk of being caned. What he overhears repels him: walking around in a baby’s nappy, for instance, or drinking urine. If that is what you have to go through before you can become a teacher, he refuses to become a teacher.

  There are rumours that the Government is going to order all schoolchildren with Afrikaans surnames to be transferred to Afrikaans classes. His parents talk about it in low voices; they are clearly worried. As for him, he is filled with panic at the thought of having to move to an Afrikaans class. He tells his parents he will not obey. He will refuse to go to school. They try to calm him. ‘Nothing will happen,’ they say. ‘It is just talk. It will be years before they do anything.’ He is not reassured.

  It will be up to the school inspectors, he learns, to remove false English boys from the English classes. He lives in dread of the day when the inspector will come, run his finger down the register, call out his name, and tell him to pack his books. He has a plan for that day, carefully worked out. He will pack his books and leave the room without protest. But he will not go to the Afrikaans class. Instead, calmly, so as not to attract attention, he will walk over to the bicycle shed, take his bicycle, and ride home so fast that no one can catch him. Then he will close and lock the front door and tell his mother that he is not going back to school, that if she betrays him he will kill himself.

  An image of Dr Malan is engraved in his mind. Dr Malan’s round, bald face is without understanding or mercy. His gullet pulses like a frog’s. His lips are pursed.

  He has not forgotten Dr Malan’s first act in 1948: to ban all Captain Marvel and Superman comics, allowing only comics with animal characters, comics intended to keep one a baby, to pass through the Customs.

  He thinks of the Afrikaans songs they are made to sing at school. He has come to hate them so much that he wants to scream and shout and make farting noises during the singing, particularly during ‘Kom ons gaan blomme pluk,’ with its children gambolling in the fields among chirping birds and jolly insects.

  One Saturday morning he and two friends cycle out of Worcester along the De Doorns road. Within half an hour they are out of sight of human habitation. They leave their bicycles at the roadside and strike off into the hills. They find a cave, make a fire, and eat the sandwiches they have brought. Suddenly a huge, truculent Afrikaans boy in khaki shorts appears. ‘Wie het julle toestemming gegee?’ – Who gave you permission?

  They are struck dumb. A cave: do they need permission to be in a cave? They try to make up lies, but it is no use. ‘Julle sal hier moet bly totdat my pa kom,’ the boy announces: You will have to wait here till my father comes. He mentions a lat, a strop: a cane, a strap; they are going to be taught a lesson.

  He grows light-headed with fear. Here, out in the veld where there is no one to call to, they are going to be beaten. There is no appeal they can make. For the fact is they are guilty, he most of all. He was the one who assured the others, when they climbed through the fence, that it could not be a farm, it was just veld. He is the ringleader, it was his idea from the beginning, there is no one else on to whom the blame can be shifted.

  The farmer arrives with his dog, a sly-looking, yellow-eyed Alsatian. Again the questions, this time in English, questions without answers. By what right are they here? Why did they not ask permission? Again the pathetic, stupid defence must be gone through: they did not know, they thought it was just veld. To himself he swears he will never make the same mistake again. Never again will he be so stupid as to climb through a fence and think he can get away with it. Stupid! he thinks to himself: stupid, stupid, stupid!

  The farmer does not happen to have a lat or a strap or a whip with him. ‘Your lucky day,’ he says. They stand rooted to the spot, not understanding. ‘Go.’

  Stupidly they clamber down the hillside, careful not to run for fear the dog will come after them growling and slavering, to where their bicycles wait at the roadside. There is nothing they can say to redeem the experience. The Afrikaners have not even behaved badly. It is they who have lost.

  Ten

  In the early mornings there are Coloured children trotting along the National Road with pencil-cases and exercise books, some even with satchels on their backs, on their way to school. But they are young children, very young: by the time they have reached his age, ten or eleven, they will have left school behind and be out in the world earning their daily bread.

  On his birthday, instead of a party, he is given ten shillings to take his friends for a treat. He invites his three best friends to the Globe Café; they sit at a marble-topped table and order banana splits or chocolate fudge sundaes. He feels princely, dispensing pleasure like this; the occasion would be a marvellous success, were it not spoiled by the ragged Coloured children standing at the window looking in at them.

  On the faces of these children he sees none of the hatred which, he is prepared to acknowledge, he and his friends deserve for having so much money while they are penniless. On the contrary, they are like children at a circus, drinking in the sight, utterly absorbed, missing nothing.

  If he were someone else, he would ask the Portuguese with the brilliantined hair who owns the Globe to chase them away. It is quite normal to chase beggar children away. You have only to contort your face into a scowl and wave your arms and shout, ‘Voetsek, hotnot! Loop! Loop!’ and then turn to whoever is watching, friend or stranger, and explain: ‘Hulle soek net iets om te steel. Hull is almal skelms.’ – They are just looking for something to steal. They are all thieves. But if he were to get up and go to the Portuguese, what would he say? ‘They are spoiling my birthday, it is not fair, it hurts my heart to see them’? Whatever happens, whether they are chased away or not, it is too late, his heart is already hurt.

  He thinks of Afrikaners as people in a rage all the time because their hearts are hurt. He thinks of the English as people who have not fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well.

  This is only one of his theories about the English and the Afrikaners. The fly in the ointment, unfortunately, is Trevelyan.

  Trevelyan was one of the lodgers who boarded with them in the house in Liesbeeck Road, Rosebank, the house with the great oak tree in the front garden where he was happy. Trevelyan had the best room, the one with French windows opening on to the stoep. He was young, he was tall, he was friendly, he could not speak a word of Afrikaans, he was English through and through. In the mornings Trevelyan had breakfast in the kitchen before going off to work; in the evenings he came back and had supper with them. He kept his room, which was anyhow out of bounds, locked; but there was nothing interesting in it except an electric shaver made in America.

  His father, though older than Trevelyan, became Trevelyan’s friend. On Saturdays they listened to the radio together, to C K Friedlander broadcasting rugby matches from Newlands.

  Then Eddie arrived. Eddie was a seven-year-old Coloured boy from Ida’s Valley near Stellenbosch. He came to work for them: the arrangement was made between Eddie’s mother and Aunt Winnie, who lived in Stellenbosch. In return for washing dishes and sweeping and polishing, Eddie would live with them in Rosebank and be given his meals, while on the first of every month his mother would be sent a postal order for two pounds ten shillings.

  After two months of living and working in Rosebank, Eddie ran away. He disappeared during the night; his absence was discovered in the morning. The police were called in; Eddie was found not far away, hiding in the bushes along the Liesbeeck River. He was found not by the police but by Trevelyan, who dragged him back, crying and kicking shamelessly, and locked him up in the old observatory in the back garden.

  Obviously Eddie would have to be sent back to Ida’s Valley. Now that he had dropped the pretence of being content, he would run away at every opportunity. Apprenticeship had not worked.

  But befor
e Aunt Winnie in Stellenbosch could be telephoned there was the question of punishment for the trouble Eddie had caused: for the calling in of the police, for the ruined Saturday morning. It was Trevelyan who offered to carry out the punishment.

  He peered into the observatory once while the punishment was going on. Trevelyan was holding Eddie by the two wrists and flogging him on the bare legs with a leather strap. His father was also there, standing to one side, watching. Eddie howled and danced; there were tears and snot everywhere. ‘Asseblief, asseblief, my baas,’ he howled, ‘ek sal nie weer nie!’ – I won’t do it again! Then the two of them noticed him and waved him out.

  The next day his aunt and uncle came from Stellenbosch in their black DKW to take Eddie back to his mother in Ida’s Valley. There were no goodbyes.

  So Trevelyan, who was English, was the one to beat Eddie. In fact, Trevelyan, who was ruddy of complexion and already a little fat, went even ruddier while he was applying the strap, and snorted with every blow, working himself into as much of a rage as any Afrikaner. How does Trevelyan, then, fit into his theory that the English are good?

  There is a debt he still owes Eddie, which he has told no one about. After he had bought the Smiths bicycle with the money for his eighth birthday and then found he did not know how to ride, it was Eddie who pushed him on Rosebank Common, shouting commands, till all of a sudden he mastered the art of balancing.

  He rode in a wide loop that first time, thrusting hard on the pedals to get through the sandy soil, till he came back to where Eddie was waiting. Eddie was excited, jumping up and down. ‘Kan ek ’n kans kry?’ he clamoured – Can I have a turn? He passed the bicycle over to Eddie. Eddie didn’t need to be pushed: he set off as fast as the wind, standing on the pedals, his old navy-blue blazer streaming behind him, riding a lot better than he did.