John Coetzee: Scenes from Provincial Life

It is permitted for boys to joke with teachers about their canes. In fact this is one area in which a certain teasing of the teachers is permitted. ‘Make him sing, sir!’ say the boys, and Mr Gouws will flash his wrist and his long cane (the longest cane in the school, though Mr Gouws is only the Standard Five teacher) will whistle through the air.

No one jokes with Mr Lategan. There is awe of Mr Lategan, of what he can do with his cane to boys who are almost men.

When his father and his father’s brothers get together on the farm at Christmas, talk always turns to their schooldays. They reminisce about their schoolmasters and their schoolmasters’ canes; they recall cold winter mornings when the cane would raise blue weals on their buttocks and the sting would linger for days in the memory of the flesh. In their words there is a note of nostalgia and pleasurable fear. He listens avidly but makes himself as inconspicuous as possible. He does not want them to turn to him, in some pause in the conversation, and ask about the place of the cane in his own life. He has never been beaten and is deeply ashamed of it. He cannot talk about canes in the easy, knowing way of these men.

He has a sense that he is damaged. He has a sense that something is slowly tearing inside him all the time: a wall, a membrane. He tried to hold himself as tight as possible to keep the tearing within bounds. To keep it within bounds, not to stop it: nothing will stop it.

Once a week he and his class troop across the school grounds to the gymnasium for PT, physical training. In the changing room they put on white singlets and shorts. Then under the direction of Mr Barnard, also attired in white, they spend half an hour leapfrogging the pommel horse or tossing the medicine ball or jumping and clapping their hands above their heads.

They do all of this with bare feet. For days ahead, he dreads baring his feet for PT, his feet that are always covered. Yet when his shoes and socks are off, it is suddenly not difficult at all. He has simply to remove himself from his shame, to go through with the undressing in a brisk, hurried way, and his feet become just feet like everyone else’s. Somewhere in the vicinity the shame still hangs, waiting to return to him, but it is a private shame, which the other boys need never be aware of.

His feet are soft and white; otherwise they look like everyone else’s, even those of boys who have no shoes and come to school barefoot. He does not enjoy PT and the stripping for PT, but he tells himself he can endure it, as he endures other things.

Then one day there is a change in the routine. They are sent from the gymnasium to the tennis courts to learn paddle tennis. The courts are some distance away; along the pathway he has to tread carefully, picking his steps among the pebbles. Under the summer sun the tarmac of the court itself is so hot that he has to hop from foot to foot to keep from burning. It is a relief to get back to the changing room and put on his shoes again; but by afternoon he can barely walk, and when his mother removes his shoes at home she finds the soles of his feet blistered and bleeding.

He spends three days at home recovering. On the fourth day he returns with a note from his mother, a note whose indignant wording he is aware of and approves. Like a wounded warrior resuming his place in the ranks, he limps down the aisle to his desk.

‘Why were you away from school?’ whisper his classmates.

‘I couldn’t walk, I had blisters on my feet from the tennis,’ he whispers back.

He expects astonishment and sympathy; instead he gets mirth. Even those of his classmates who wear shoes do not take his story seriously. Somehow they too have acquired hardened feet, feet that do not blister. He alone has soft feet, and soft feet, it is emerging, are no claim to distinction. All of a sudden he is isolated — he and, behind him, his mother.

He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all. In a normal household, he is prepared to accept, the father stands at the head: the house belongs to him, the wife and children live under his sway. But in their own case, and in the households of his mother’s two sisters as well, it is the mother and children who make up the core, while the husband is no more than an appendage, a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.

As long as he can remember he has had a sense of himself as prince of the house, and of his mother as his dubious promoter and anxious protector — anxious, dubious because, he knows, a child is not meant to rule the roost. If there is anyone to be jealous of, it is not his father but his younger brother. For his mother promotes his brother too — promotes and even, because his brother is clever but not as clever as he, nor as bold or adventurous, favours him. In fact, his mother seems always to be hovering over his brother, ready to ward off danger; whereas in his own case she is only somewhere in the background, waiting, listening, ready to come if he should call.

He wants her to behave towards him as she does towards his brother. But he wants this as a sign, a proof, no more. He knows that he will fly into a rage if she ever begins to hover over him.

He keeps driving her into corners, demanding that she admit whom she loves more, him or his brother. Always she slips the trap. ‘I love you both the same,’ she maintains, smiling. Even his most ingenious questions — what if the house were to catch fire, for instance, and she had time to rescue only one of them? — fail to snare her. ‘Both of you,’ she says, ‘I will surely save both of you. But the house won’t catch fire.’ Though he mocks her for her literal-mindedness, he respects her dogged constancy.

His rages against his mother are one of the things he has to keep a careful secret from the world outside. Only the four of them know what torrents of scorn he pours upon her, how much like an inferior he treats her. ‘If your teachers and your friends knew how you spoke to your mother …,’ says his father, wagging a finger meaningfully. He hates his father for seeing so clearly the chink in his armour.

He wants his father to beat him and turn him into a normal boy. At the same time he knows that if his father dared to strike him, he would not rest until he had his revenge. If his father were to hit him, he would go mad: he would become possessed, like a rat in a corner, hurtling about, snapping with its poisonous fangs, too dangerous to be touched.

At home he is an irascible despot, at school a lamb, meek and mild, who sits in the second row from the back, the most obscure row, so that he will not be noticed, and goes rigid with fear when the beating starts. By living this double life he has created for himself a burden of imposture. No one else has to bear anything like it, not even his brother, who is at most a nervous, wishy-washy imitation of himself. In fact, he suspects that at heart his brother may be normal. He is on his own. From no quarter can he expect support. It is up to him to somehow get beyond childhood, beyond family and school, to a new life where he will not need to pretend any more.

Childhood, says the Children’s Encyclopaedia , is a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook. It is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him. Nothing he experiences in Worcester, at home or at school, leads him to think that childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring.

Because there is no Wolf Cub pack in Worcester, he is allowed to join the Boy Scout troop though he is only ten. For his inauguration as a Scout he prepares himself punctiliously. With his mother he goes to the outfitter’s to buy the uniform: stiff olive-brown felt hat and silver hat-badge, khaki shirt and shorts and stockings, leather belt with Boy Scout clasp, green shoulder-tabs, green stocking-flashes. He cuts a five-foot stave from a poplar tree, peels off the bark, and spends an afternoon with a heated screwdriver burning into the white woodflesh the entire Morse and semaphore codes. He goes off to his first Scout meeting, the stave slung over his shoulder with a green cord that he has himself triple-braided. Taking the oath with a two-finger salute, he is by far the most impeccably outfitted of the new boys, the ‘tenderfeet’.