John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

There is one more difficult moment to get through, the moment when his father says, ‘Where’s John?’ and his mother says, ‘He’s sick,’ and his father snorts and says, ‘Pretending again.’ Through this he lies as quiet as he can, till his father is gone and his brother is gone and he can at last settle down to a day of reading.

He reads at great speed and with total absorption. During his sick spells his mother has to visit the library twice a week to take out books for him: two on her cards, another two on his own. He avoids the library himself in case, when he brings his books to be stamped, the librarian should ask questions.

He knows that if he wants to be a great man he ought to be reading serious books. He ought to be like Abraham Lincoln or James Watt, studying by candlelight while everyone else is sleeping, teaching himself Latin and Greek and astronomy. He has not abandoned the idea of being a great man; he promises himself he will soon begin serious reading; but for the present all he wants to read are stories.

He reads all the Enid Blyton mystery stories, all the Hardy Boys stories, all the Biggles stories. But the books he likes best are the French Foreign Legion stories of P C Wren. ‘Who is the greatest writer in the world?’ he asks his father. His father says Shakespeare. ‘Why not P C Wren?’ he says. His father has not read P C Wren and, despite his soldiering background, does not seem interested in doing so. ‘P C Wren wrote forty-six books. How many books did Shakespeare write?’ he challenges, and starts reciting titles. His father says ‘Aah!’ in an irritated, dismissive way but has no reply.

If his father likes Shakespeare then Shakespeare must be bad, he decides. Nevertheless, he begins to read Shakespeare, in the yellowing edition with the tattered edges that his father inherited and that may be worth lots of money because it is old, trying to discover why people say Shakespeare is great. He reads Titus Andronicus because of its Roman name, then Coriolanus , skipping the long speeches as he skips the nature descriptions in his library books.

Besides Shakespeare, his father owns the poems of Wordsworth and the poems of Keats. His mother owns the poems of Rupert Brooke. These poetry books have pride of place on the mantelshelf in the living-room, along with Shakespeare, The Story of San Michele in a leather slip-case, and a book by A J Cronin about a doctor. Twice he tries to read The Story of San Michele , but gets bored. He can never work out who Axel Munthe is, whether the book is true or a story, whether it is about a girl or a place.

One day his father comes to his room with the Wordsworth book. ‘You should read these,’ he says, and points out poems he has ticked in pencil. A few days later he comes back, wanting to discuss the poems. ‘The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion,’ his father quotes. ‘It’s great poetry, isn’t it?’ He mumbles, refuses to meet his father’s eye, refuses to play the game. It is not long before his father gives up.

He is not sorry about his churlishness. He cannot see how poetry fits into his father’s life; he suspects it is just pretence. When his mother says that in order to escape the mockery of her sisters she had to take her book and creep away in the loft, he believes her. But he cannot imagine his father, as a boy, reading poetry, who nowadays reads nothing but the newspaper. All he can imagine his father doing at that age is joking and laughing and smoking cigarettes behind the bushes.

He watches his father reading the newspaper. He reads quickly, nervously, flipping through the pages as though looking for something that is not there, cracking and slapping the pages as he turns them. When he is done with reading he folds the paper into a narrow panel and sets to work on the crossword puzzle.

His mother too reveres Shakespeare. She thinks Macbeth is Shakespeare’s greatest play. ‘If but the something could trammel up the consequences then it were,’ she gabbles, and comes to a stop; ‘and bring with his surcease success,’ she continues, nodding to keep the beat. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not wash this little hand,’ she adds. Macbeth was the play she studied in school; her teacher used to stand behind her, pinching her arm until she had recited the whole of the speech. ‘ Kom nou, Vera! ’ he would say — ‘Come on!’ — pinching her, and she would bring out a few more words.

What he cannot understand about his mother is that, though she is so stupid that she cannot help him with his Standard Four homework, her English is faultless, particularly when she writes. She uses words in their right sense, her grammar is faultless. She is at home in the language, it is an area where she cannot be shaken. How did it happen? Her father was Piet Wehmeyer, a flat Afrikaans name. In the photograph album, in his collarless shirt and wide-brimmed hat, he looks like any ordinary farmer. In the Uniondale district where they lived there were no English; all the neighbours seem to have been named Zondagh. Her own mother was born Marie du Biel, of German parents with not a drop of English blood in their veins. Yet when she had children she gave them English names — Roland, Winifred, Ellen, Vera, Norman, Lancelot — and spoke English to them at home. Where could they have learned English, she and Piet?

His father’s English is nearly as good, though his accent has more than a trace of Afrikaans in it and he says ‘thutty’ for ‘thirty’. His father is always turning the pages of the Pocket Oxford English Dictionary for his crossword puzzles. He seems at least distantly familiar with every word in the dictionary, and every idiom too. He pronounces the more nonsensical idioms with relish, as though consolidating them in his memory: pitch in, come a cropper .

He himself does not read further than Coriolanus in the Shakespeare book. But for the sports page and the comic strips, the newspaper bores him. When he has nothing else to read, he reads the green books. ‘Bring me a green book!’ he calls to his mother from his sickbed. The green books are Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia , which have been travelling with them ever since he can remember. He has been through them scores of times; when he was still a baby he tore pages out of them, scrawled over them with crayons, broke their bindings, so that now they have to be handled gingerly.

He does not actually read the green books: the prose makes him too impatient, it is too gushing and childish, except for the second half of volume 10, the index, which is full of factual information. But he pores over the pictures, particularly the photographs of marble sculptures, naked men and women with wisps of cloth around their middles. Smooth, slim marble girls fill his erotic dreams.

The surprising thing about his colds is how quickly they clear up or seem to clear up. By eleven in the morning the sneezing has stopped, the stuffiness in his head has lifted, he feels fine. He has had enough of his sweaty, smelly pyjamas, of the stale blankets and sagging mattress, the soggy handkerchiefs all over the place. He gets out of bed but does not get dressed: that would be pushing his luck too far. Cautious not to show his face outdoors in case a neighbour or passer-by reports him, he plays with his Meccano set or sticks stamps in his album or threads buttons on strings or braids cords out of leftover skeins of wool. His drawer is full of cords he has braided, that have no use except as belts for the dressing gown he does not have. When his mother comes into his room he looks as hangdog as he can, bracing himself against her caustic remarks.

On every side he is suspected of being a cheat. He can never persuade his mother that he is really sick; when she gives in to his pleas, she does so ungraciously, and only because she does not know how to say no to him. His schoolfellows think he is a namby-pamby and a mother’s darling.