Nadine Gordimer: The Lying Days

If Mr. Bond was already serving, it would be Mr. Cronje, the tall thin Afrikaans assistant, who spoke a very careful and peculiar English and had a duodenal ulcer. Before she started to give her order my mother would ask how he was. He would take his pencil from behind his big sad ear and put it back again and say, “Ag, still alive, you know, Mrs. Shaw, still alive.” And then looking down the long flat expanse of his white apron he would tell her about the attack he had on Sunday night, or the new diet of kaffir beer or sour milk which his wife’s sister had recommended. And my mother would say, “You must take care of yourself, you must look after yourself.” He would sigh and his false teeth would move loosely in his wide mouth. “But you know how it is, if you not you own boss.…”

While my mother was absorbed at the counter in one way or another, I wandered off round the shop. Near the door there was a sloping glass showcase displaying varieties of biscuits and in the middle of the shop was a pillar with mirrors all round. The oilcloth round the base was stained and often splattered because all the dogs that were brought into the store strained at their leads to get to it. Occasionally a stray ranged in from the street, wavering bewilderedly round the shop and then sniffing up to the pillar; then one of the assistants would rush out flapping his apron and shout, “Voetsak!” and the startled creature would flatten itself out into the street. At Christmas and Easter there were big packing cases piled up open on the floor at the far end of the shop, filled with boxes of elaborate crackers, or fancy chocolate eggs packed in silver paper and straw, and there was always the “wedding present” showcase, all the year round, with flowery tea sets and Dickens character jugs and cut-crystal violet vases that were to be seen again behind glass in every sitting-room china cabinet on the Mine. Sometimes there were other children whom I knew, waiting for their mothers. Together we stood with our hands and breath pressed against the glass, playing a game that was a child’s earnest and possessive form of window-shopping. “I dabby the pink tea set and the balloon lady and the two dogs. … And the gold dish” was added in triumph, “And I dabby the gold dish!” “No you can’t — I dabbied it first, I said the gold dish the first time!”

Then quite suddenly there was the waiting face at the door, the hand stretched impatiently. “Come on. Come, Helen, I’ve got a lot to do, you know.”

Out in the street little boys as old as I was or younger were selling the local paper, which was published every Saturday morning. They were Afrikaans children mostly, with flat businesslike faces, dull brownish, and cropped brownish hair. Their small dry dirty fingers fumbled the pennies seriously; sometimes you gave them a tickey for the tup-penny paper, and the penny was theirs.

The barefoot boys were soft-footed everywhere, at the market, the railway station, the street corners, outside the bars. And the yellowish paper with its coarse blotting-paper surface on which the black print blurred slightly was rolled up under elbows; stuck out of pockets and baskets; blew at the foot of babies’ prams. My mother would open it in the car, going home, and pass on the news while my father avoided the zigzag of native errand boys, shouting to one another as they rode, and the children waiting bent forward on tiptoe at the curb, ready to run across like startled rabbits at the wrong moment. The Social and Personal columns had the widest possible application and filled two whole pages. Twice I had been mentioned: Congratulations to Helen Shaw, who has passed her Junior Pianoforte examination with 78 marks, and dainty little Helen, daughter of Mrs. G. P. Shaw, who made a charming Alice in Wonderland, and won the Mayoress’s special prize for the best character costume. Each mine had a column to itself, and often “Atherton Mine Notes,” written in a highly playful style by “our special correspondent”—an unidentified but suspected member of the Mine community — mentioned popular or hard-working Mrs. Shaw, wife of our Assistant Secretary. My father’s name was usually in the tennis fixtures for the week, too. I liked to read down the list of names and say out loud my father’s, just as if it were anyone else’s.

Our life was punctuated by the Mine hooter.

It blew at seven in the morning and at noon and at half-past four in the afternoon. The people in the town set their watches by it; the people on the Mine needn’t look at their watches because of it. At midnight on New Year’s Eve its low, cavernous bellow (there was a lonely, stately creature there, echoing its hollow cry down the deep cave beneath the shaft, all along the dark airless passages hollowed out beneath the crust of the town) announced the New Year. Sometimes it lifted its voice at some unaccustomed odd hour of an ordinary day, and people in the town paused a moment and said: “There must’ve been an accident underground.” To women on the Mine it came like the cry of a beast in distress, and it would be something to ask their men when they came home at lunchtime.

For there were very seldom any serious accidents, and few of those that did happen involved white men. Natives were sometimes trapped by a fall of rock from a hanging, and had to be dug out, dead or alive, while the hooter wailed disaster. When a white man was killed, the papers recorded the tragedy, giving his name and occupation and details of the family he left. If no white man was affected, there was an item headed: “FATAL FALL OF HANGING. There was a fall of hanging at the East Shaft of Basilton Levels, East Rand, at 2 P.M. yesterday. Two natives were killed, and three others escaped with minor injuries.”

My father was Assistant Secretary and so never touched the real working life of the Mine that went on underground the way the real life of the body and brain goes on under the surface of flesh. He went down the shaft into the Mine perhaps once or twice a year, part of an official party conducting visitors from the Group — the corporation of mining companies to which the Mine belonged.

The “underground” people we knew — shift bosses and Mine captains and surveyors — had one advantage over us. They were very much luckier with garden boys than my father was. All had their own teams of boys working for them underground; they could detail one, often two or three, to spend a day working in the gardens of their homes. My father had more difficulty. The clerks and errand boys at the office could speak English and write, and were rarely willing to spend their Saturday afternoon off working in our garden, even for money. And they did not belong, the way the Mine boys belonged to their white bosses underground, to my father. He could not send them off to dig a sweet-pea trench or clip a hedge, any more than he could give them a hiding now and then to keep them in order. The underground people found that an occasional good crack, as they put it, knocked any nonsense out of the boys and kept them attentive and respectful, without any malice on either side.

But there was one old boy who had started work as a messenger in the secretary’s office when my father had started there as a junior clerk; now my father was Assistant Secretary and old Paul was still a messenger, and he came still, as he had done since my parents had married, to work in our garden two Saturdays a month.

He was one of the old kind, my mother said. A good old thing. Here you are Paul, she’d say, taking him out a big dish of tea and some meat between thick bread. And she’d stand with one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes, talking to him from the lawn. They talked about bringing up children, and how Paul managed. He had two sons at school in the Northern Transvaal; it was hard, and they did not always know that what their father and mother did for them was best. They wanted to come home to their mother in the Location. But what was the use of that? — That was the beginning of loafers and no-goods, she agreed. If they want to get on nice — Paul’s hand round the bowl of strong tea trembled after the unaccustomed labor of the spade, his small pointed beard held neatly away from the liquid — they must finish Standard Six. — Yes, I know, Paul, but children always think they know better. They must have what they want, and nothing you do is right for them. My wife — he fitted the cold meat carefully between the bread — my wife she say let them come, I mus’ see my children while they still small. It’s no good they should be away and their mother doesn’t know them. — I know, I know, Paul, it’s the same with the master and Miss Helen. I say that the child must do this, because it is good for her, he says let her do that. …