Doris Lessing - Going Home

Time passed, nearly an hour of it; the queue had hardly moved forward.

They were now talking of one Jerry, and here, it seemed, was a matter they approved of, for the fatalistic shrug of the Government-oppressed countryman had given way to the earnest manner of two children swapping confidences.

‘I’m with you. Jerry is a good type. Not like some magistrates. We are lucky to have him in our district.’

‘Fair’s fair with Jerry. He warns you – then he gets you, square and legal.’

‘That’s what I say. He came to my place one sundown – he said, “Now look here, man, that’s the third time I saw you doing seventy through the township. Next time I’ll see there’s a fine.”’

‘Then he will. Because he does what he says. He sent a chit around to me. “Tom,” he said, “it was nearly eighty you were doing today. You only have to slow down to thirty for a mile through the village. Is that so much to ask?” Yes, that’s what he wrote to me.’

‘Yes, that’s Jerry all right. He said to me, “There’s a school, too. The place is full of kids. Use your head,” he said. “Think how you’d feel if you got a couple of those kids. Use your heart.”’

‘Yes, that’s what he said to me when he came to see me. He gave me fair warning. Next day, that was yesterday, I got a summons. I was doing eighty, mind.’ Here he paused and looked with dark solemnity at the other. ‘Eighty. So I was summoned. Fair’s fair.’

‘Yes, you can always trust Jerry to do what’s right.’

‘Yes, he never lets you get away with it. Not more than what’s fair.’

Which conversation may, perhaps, throw light on another: three weeks later, a friend of mine who inspects African schools, in that voice of exasperated affection which is common among liberal members of the administration who have to work constantly against their own beliefs, ‘Damn it, man, they’re mad. Say what you like. Yes, all right, we’re mad, but they’re madder. There are times I could throw the whole thing up. You know what? There’s a teacher. He’s been swotting and struggling for that ruddy Standard IV certificate for years, and then he got it, and he was in a kraal school at last, a big man with all his six years’ schooling behind him and all’s hunkydory. So then I went out to inspect. I found him there in that pitiful, bloody little school, next door to a whacking great church, needless to say, and he had his sixty kids sitting on the mud floor in neat little rows all chanting the ABC in Shona, and there he was drunk as a lord and staggering around like a sick chicken. I said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed, Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savings for fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at Jackson’s farm, and I lay awake all night tortured – man, but tortured! – thinking of that poor silly bugger and his dad’s life savings. Because, my God, if I was stuck out on that Reserve 150 miles from anywhere on £6 a month I’d drink myself to death in a month, man. Next morning I woke up more dead than alive, having decided I was going to clear out of this bloody country – no, really, I can’t stand it, I’m going – when who should I see but Joshua on his bicycle? He had cycled 20 miles since dawn through the bush with a chicken. The chicken was for me. You could have knocked me down with a – I said to him, “Damn it, you poor fool, Joshua, damn it! I’ve given you the sack, I’ve ruined your life, now you’ll have to go off and dig a ditch somewhere, and you bring me a chicken. Have a heart,” I said, “don’t do that to me.” “Sir,” he said. “It came into my heart last night to bring you a chicken. It is for you, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that off he went back to his bicycle. So I brought the chicken home, and here was my wife with psychological troubles, and my kids, damned spoilt brats who are so blasé and full of experience from the pictures they can’t get a thrill out of anything, and the big baas, that’s me. And the happy family, we ate that poor bastard’s chicken, and I don’t know why it didn’t choke us.’

‘Now, now, darling,’ said his wife, ‘you must keep a sense of proportion.’

After two and a half hours I had reached the door of the office. It seems that this was the time of the year for renewing licences, and so the whole countryside moves into town for that purpose, and patiently queues behind the single counter that does duty for the ordinary run of business during the rest of the year. Then I discovered I was in the wrong queue, so I started again. At last, I was told I must go to an inner office; and the official invited me to do so through an inside passage, because otherwise I would have to pass through a crowd of natives, and I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?

Inside there was a nice girl, who in the best tradition of the country, which is to have no respect for institutions, said, ‘Well, I can’t help you, because that silly lot of MPs we’ve got have absent-mindedly passed a law saying that everyone who loses his licence must take another driving test. I expect when they’ve noticed what they’ve done, they’ll change it back again, but in the meantime I think you’ve had it, because there’s queues miles long of people waiting to be tested for new licences and I can only hope there are some MPs among them.’

‘But last time I lost my licence,’ I said, ‘all I did was to go to the office and they looked up a file and gave me a new one.’

‘That was in the good old days. That was before Federation. No, things aren’t what they used to be. And besides, it seems the files have got mislaid.’

So I went back to the house and telephoned the police at Banket where sometime in the ’thirties I was given my licence by a young policeman who was not interested in the quality of my driving. But they said the records were always destroyed after five years, and they couldn’t help me – the place I wanted was that office in town.

I fell into despair; but after reflecting that it was unlikely that the whole character – or, as the Americans would say, the mores – of the country had changed in seven years, I walked back to the licensing office, past the white queue that still waited, through the black queue, into the inner office, and said I had lost my driving licence. Whereupon a young man who had either not heard of the law just passed by Parliament, or who didn’t care, charged me 1s. and gave me a substitute licence. And so the magnificent empty roads of the country were open to me.

Down the empty road to Umtali we drove. It is the road running east to the Portuguese border – a road that drives straight up one rise, down the other side, up again; first through hills tumbled all over with granite boulders like giant pebbles balancing on each other, sometimes so lightly it seems a breath of wind would topple them apart; then through mountains; for nearly 150 miles, and one looks down on Umtali from above, a small, pretty, sleepy town that never changes, in a hollow in the mountains.