John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘ Sies! ’ says one of the other customers.

He wants to protest: ‘What must I do? Must I not spit? Must I swallow the fly? I am just a child!’ But explanations count for nothing among these merciless people. He wipes the spit off the counter with his hand and amid disapproving silence pays for the cigarettes.

Reminiscing about the old days on the farm, his father and his father’s brothers come once again to the subject of their own father. ‘’ n Ware ou jintlman! ’ they say, a real old gentleman, repeating their formula for him, and laugh: ‘ Dis wat hy op sy grafsteen sou gewens het: A farmer and a gentleman’ — That’s what he would have liked on his gravestone. They laugh most of all because their father continued to wear riding boots when everyone else on the farm wore velskoen .

His mother, listening to them, sniffs scornfully. ‘Don’t forget how frightened you were of him,’ she says. ‘You were afraid to light a cigarette in front of him, even when you were grown men.’

They are abashed, they have no reply: she has clearly touched a nerve.

His grandfather, the one with the gentlemanly pretensions, once owned not only the farm and a half-share in the hotel and general dealer’s store at Fraserburg Road, but a house in Merweville with a flagpole in front of it on which he hoisted the Union Jack on the King’s birthday.

‘’ n Ware ou jintlman en ’n ware ou jingo! ’ add the brothers: a real old jingo! Again they laugh.

His mother is right about them. They sound like children saying naughty words behind a parent’s back. Anyway, by what right do they make fun of their father? But for him they would not speak English at all: they would be like their neighbours the Botes and the Nigrinis, stupid and heavy, with no conversation except about sheep and the weather. At least when the family gets together there is a babble of jokes and laughter in a mishmash of tongues; whereas when the Nigrinis or the Botes come visiting the air at once turns sombre and heavy and dull. ‘ Ja-nee ,’ say the Botes, sighing. ‘ Ja-nee ,’ say the Coetzees, and pray that their guests will hurry up and leave.

What of himself? If the grandfather he reveres was a jingo, must he be a jingo too? Can a child be a jingo? He stands to attention when ‘God Save the King’ is played in the bioscope and the Union Jack waves on the screen. Bagpipe music sends a shiver down his spine, as do words like stalwart, valorous. Should he keep it a secret, this attachment of his to England?

He cannot understand why it is that so many people around him dislike England. England is Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. England is doing one’s duty and accepting one’s fate in a quiet, unfussy way. England is the boy at the battle of Jutland, who stood by his guns while the deck was burning under his feet. England is Sir Lancelot of the Lake and Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood with his longbow of yew and his suit of Lincoln green. What do the Afrikaners have to compare? Dirkie Uys, who rode his horse till it died. Piet Retief, who was made a fool of by Dingaan. And then the Voortrekkers getting their revenge by shooting thousands of Zulus who didn’t have guns, and being proud of it.

There is a Church of England church in Worcester, and a clergyman with grey hair and a pipe who doubles as Scoutmaster and whom some of the English boys in his class — the proper English boys, with English names and homes in the old, leafy part of Worcester — refer to familiarly as Padre. When the English talk like that he falls silent. There is the English language, which he commands with ease. There is England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is loyal. But more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass.

Something has been arranged on the telephone, he does not know what, but it makes him uneasy. He does not like the pleased, secretive smile his mother wears, the smile that means she has been meddling in his affairs.

These are the last days before they leave Worcester. They are also the best days of the school year, with examinations over and nothing to do but help the teacher fill in his mark book.

Mr Gouws reads out lists of marks; the boys add them up, subject by subject, then work out the percentages, racing to be the first with his hand up. The game lies in guessing which marks belong to whom. Usually he can recognize his own marks as a sequence rising to nineties and hundreds for arithmetic and tailing off with seventies for history and geography.

He does not do well at history or geography because he hates memorizing. So much does he hate it that he postpones learning for history and geography examinations until the very last minute, until the night before the examination or even the morning of the examination. He hates the very sight of the history textbook, with its stiff chocolate-brown cover and its long, boring lists of the causes of things (the causes of the Napoleonic Wars, the causes of the Great Trek). Its authors are Taljaard and Schoeman. He imagines Taljaard as thin and dry, Schoeman as plump and balding and bespectacled; Taljaard and Schoeman on either side of a table in a room in Paarl, writing bad-tempered pages and passing them across to each other. He cannot imagine why they should have wanted to write their book in English except to mortify the Engelse children and teach them a lesson.

Geography is no better: lists of towns, lists of rivers, lists of pro ducts. When he is asked to name the products of a country he always ends his list with hides and skins and hopes he is right. He does not know the difference between a hide and a skin, but nor does anyone else.

As for the rest of the examinations, he does not look forward to them, yet, when the time comes, plunges into them willingly. He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes down the answers quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped.

Sometimes, striking two rocks against each other and inhaling, he can reinvoke this state, this smell, this taste: gunpowder, iron, heat, a steady thudding in the veins.

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.