John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Mr Gouws uses the cane as much as any other teacher. But the punishment he favours, when the class has been too noisy for too long, is to order them to put down their pens, shut their books, clasp their hands behind their heads, close their eyes, and sit absolutely still.

Save for Mr Gouws’s footfalls as he patrols up and down the rows, there is absolute silence in the room. From the eucalyptus trees around the quadrangle comes the tranquil cooing of doves. This is a punishment he could endure forever, with equanimity: the doves, the soft breathing of the boys around him.

Disa Road, where Mr Gouws lives, is also in Reunion Park, in the new, northern extension of the township where he has never explored. Not only does Mr Gouws live in Reunion Park and cycle to school on a bicycle with fat tyres: he has a wife, a plain, dark woman, and, even more surprising, two small children. This he discovers in the living room of 11 Disa Road, where there are scones and a pot of tea waiting on the table, and where, as he had feared, he is at last left alone with Mr Gouws, having to make desperate, false conversation.

It gets even worse. Mr Gouws — who has put aside his tie and jacket for shorts and khaki socks — is trying to pretend to him that, now that the school year is over, now that he is about to leave Worcester, the two of them can be friends. In fact he is trying to suggest that they have been friends all year: the teacher and the cleverest boy, the class leader.

He grows flustered and stiff. Mr Gouws offers him a second scone, which he refuses. ‘Come on!’ says Mr Gouws, and smiles, and puts it on his plate anyway. He longs to be away.

He had wanted to leave Worcester with everything in order. He had been prepared to give Mr Gouws a place in his memory beside Mrs Sanderson: not quite with her, but close to her. Now Mr Gouws is spoiling it. He wishes he wouldn’t.

The second scone sits on the plate uneaten. He will pretend no more: he grows mute and stubborn. ‘Must you go?’ says Mr Gouws. He nods. Mr Gouws rises and accompanies him to the front gate, which is a copy of the gate at 12 Poplar Avenue, the hinges whining on exactly the same high note.

At least Mr Gouws has the sense not to make him shake hands or do something else stupid.

They are leaving Worcester. His father has decided that his future does not after all lie with Standard Canners, which, according to him, is on its way down. He is going to return to legal practice.

There is a farewell party for him at his office, from which he returns with a new watch. Shortly thereafter he sets off for Cape Town by himself, leaving his mother behind to supervise the moving. She hires a contractor named Retief, striking a bargain that for fifteen pounds he will convey not only the furniture but the three of them too, in the cab of his van.

Retief’s men load the van; his mother and brother climb aboard. He makes a last dash around the empty house, saying goodbye. Behind the front door is the umbrella stand that usually holds two golf clubs and a walking stick but is now empty. ‘They’ve left the umbrella stand!’ he shouts. ‘Come!’ calls his mother — ‘Forget that old umbrella stand!’ ‘No!’ he shouts back, and will not leave until the men have loaded the umbrella stand. ‘ Dis net ’n ou stuk pyp ,’ grumbles Retief — It’s just an old piece of pipe.

So he learns that what he thought was an umbrella stand is nothing but a metre length of concrete sewer-pipe that his mother has painted green. This is what they are taking with them to Cape Town, along with the cushion covered in dog-hairs that Cossack used to sleep on, and the rolled-up netting-wire from the chicken-coop, and the machine that throws cricket balls, and the wooden stave with the Morse code. Labouring up Bain’s Kloof Pass, Retief’s van feels like Noah’s Ark, bearing into the future the sticks and stones of their old life.

In Reunion Park they had paid twelve pounds a month for their house. The house his father has rented in Plumstead costs twenty-five pounds. It lies at the very limit of Plumstead, facing an expanse of sand and wattle bush where only a week after their arrival the police find a dead baby in a brown paper packet. A half-hour walk in the other direction lies Plumstead railway station. The house itself is newly built, like all the houses in Evremonde Road, with picture windows and parquet floors. The doors are warped, the locks do not lock, there is a pile of rubble in the backyard.

Next door live a couple newly arrived from England. The man is forever washing his car; the woman, wearing red shorts and sunglasses, spends her days in a deckchair sunning her long white legs.

The immediate task is to find schools for him and his brother. Cape Town is not like Worcester, where all the boys went to the boys’ school and all the girls to the girls’ school. In Cape Town there are schools to choose among, some of them good schools, some not. To get into a good school you need contacts, and they have few contacts.

Through the influence of his mother’s brother Lance they get an interview at Rondebosch Boys’ High. Dressed neatly in his shorts and shirt and tie and navy-blue blazer with the Worcester Boys’ Primary badge on the breast pocket, he sits with his mother on a bench outside the headmaster’s office. When their turn comes they are ushered into a wood-panelled room full of photographs of rugby and cricket teams. The headmaster’s questions are all addressed to his mother: where they live, what his father does. Then comes the moment he has been waiting for. From her handbag she produces the report that proves he was first in class and that ought therefore to open all doors to him.

The headmaster puts on his reading-glasses. ‘So you came first in your class,’ he says. ‘Good, good! But you won’t find it so easy here.’

He had hoped to be tested: to be asked the date of the battle of Blood River, or, even better, to be given some mental arithmetic. But that is all, the interview is over. ‘I can make no promises,’ says the headmaster. ‘His name will go down on the waiting list, then we must hope for a withdrawal.’

His name goes down on the waiting lists of three schools, with no success. Coming first in Worcester is evidently not good enough for Cape Town.

The last resort is the Catholic school, St Joseph’s. St Joseph’s has no waiting list: they will take anyone prepared to pay their fees, which for non-Catholics are twelve pounds a quarter.

What is being brought home to them, to him and his mother, is that in Cape Town different classes of people attend different schools. St Joseph’s caters for, if not the lowest class, then the second lowest. Her failure to get him into a better school leaves his mother bitter but does not affect him. He is not sure what class they belong to, where they fit in. For the present he is content merely to get by. The threat of being sent to an Afrikaans school and consigned to an Afrikaans life has receded — that is all that matters. He can relax. He does not even have to go on pretending to be a Catholic.

The real English do not go to a school like St Joseph’s. On the streets of Rondebosch, on their way to and from their own schools, he can see the real English every day, can admire their straight blond hair and golden skins, their clothes that are never too small or too large, their quiet confidence. They josh each other (a word he knows from the public-school stories he has read) in an easy way, without the raucousness and clumsiness he is used to. He has no aspiration to join them, but he watches closely and tries to learn.

The boys from Diocesan College, who are the most English of all and do not condescend even to play rugby or cricket against St Joseph’s, live in select areas that, being far from the railway line, he hears of but never sees: Bishopscourt, Fernwood, Constantia. They have sisters who go to schools like Herschel and St Cyprian’s, whom they genially watch over and protect. In Worcester he had rarely laid eyes on a girl: his friends seemed always to have brothers, not sisters. Now he glimpses for the first time the sisters of the English, so golden-blonde, so beautiful, that he cannot believe they are of this earth.