John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

It is not forgery he is contemplating. People have tried that route before: pretended to find, in a chest in an attic in a country house, a journal, yellow with age, stained with damp, describing an expedition across the deserts of Tartary or into the territories of the Great Moghul. Deceptions of that kind do not interest him. The challenge he faces is a purely literary one: to write a book whose horizon of knowledge will be that of Burchell’s time, the 1820s, yet whose response to the world around it will be alive in a way that Burchell, despite his energy and intelligence and curiosity and sangfroid, could not be because he was an Englishman in a foreign country, his mind half occupied with Pembrokeshire and the sisters he had left behind.

He will have to school himself to write from within the 1820s. Before he can bring that off he will need to know less than he knows now; he will need to forget things. Yet before he can forget he will have to know what to forget; before he can know less he will have to know more. Where will he find what he needs to know? He has no training as an historian, and anyway what he is after will not be in history books, since it belongs to the mundane, a mundane as common as the air one breathes. Where will he find the common knowledge of a bygone world, a knowledge too humble to know it is knowledge?

What happens next happens swiftly. In the mail on the table in the hallway there appears a buff envelope marked OHMS, addressed to him. He takes it to his room and with a sinking heart opens it. He has twenty-one days, the letter tells him, in which to renew his work permit, failing which permission to reside in the United Kingdom will be withdrawn. He may renew the permit by presenting himself, his passport, and a copy of Form I-48, completed by his employer, at the Home Office premises on Holloway Road on any weekday between the hours of 9.00 and 12.30, and 1.30 and 4.00.

So IBM has betrayed him. IBM has told the Home Office he has left their employ.

What must he do? He has enough money for a one-way ticket back to South Africa. But it is inconceivable that he should reappear in Cape Town like a dog with its tail between its legs, defeated. What is there for him to do in Cape Town anyway? Resume his tutoring at the University? How long can that go on? He is too old by now for scholarships, he would be competing against younger students with better records. The fact is, if he goes back to South Africa he will never escape again. He will become like the people who gather on Clifton beach in the evenings to drink wine and tell each other about the old days on Ibiza.

If he wants to stay on in England, there are two avenues he can see open to him. He can grit his teeth and try schoolmastering again; or he can go back to computer programming.

There is a third option, hypothetical. He can quit his present address and melt into the masses. He can go hop-picking in Kent (one does not need papers for that), work on building sites. He can sleep in youth hostels, in barns. But he knows he will do none of this. He is too incompetent to lead a life outside the law, too prim, too afraid of getting caught.

The job listings in the newspapers are full of appeals for computer programmers. England cannot, it would seem, find enough of them. Most are for openings in payroll departments. These he ignores, responding only to the computer companies themselves, the rivals, great and small, of IBM. Within days he has had an interview with International Computers, and, without hesitation, accepted their offer. He is exultant. He is employed again, he is safe, he is not going to be ordered out of the country.

There is one catch. Though International Computers has its head office in London, the work for which they want him is out in the country, in Berkshire. It takes a trip to Waterloo, followed by a one-hour train journey, followed by a bus ride, to get there. It will not be possible to live in London. It is the Rothamsted story all over again.

International Computers is prepared to lend new employees the down payment on an appropriately modest home. In other words, with a stroke of a pen he can become a house owner (he! a house owner!) and by the same act commit himself to mortgage repayments that would bind him to his job for the next ten or fifteen years. In fifteen years he will be an old man. A single rushed decision and he will have signed away his life, signed away all chance of becoming an artist. With a little house of his own in a row of redbrick houses, he will be absorbed without trace into the British middle class. All that will be needed to complete the picture will be a little wife and car.

He finds an excuse not to sign up for the house loan. Instead he signs a lease on a flat on the top floor of a house on the fringes of the town. The landlord is an ex-Army officer, now a stockbroker, who likes to be addressed as Major Arkwright. To Major Arkwright he explains what computers are, what computer programming is, what a solid career it affords (‘There is bound to be huge expansion in the industry’). Major Arkwright jocularly calls him a boffin (‘We’ve never had a boffin in the upstairs flat before’), a designation he accepts without murmur.

Working for International Computers is quite unlike working for IBM. To begin with, he can pack his black suit away. He has an office of his own, a cubicle in a Quonset hut in the back garden of the house that International Computers has outfitted as its computing laboratory. ‘The Manor House’: that is what they call it, a rambling old building at the end of a leaf-strewn driveway two miles outside Bracknell. Presumably it has a history, though no one knows what that history is.

Despite the designation ‘Computing Laboratory’, there is no actual computer on the premises. To test the programs he is being hired to write, he will have to travel to Cambridge University, which owns one of the three Atlas computers, the only three in existence, each slightly different from the others. The Atlas computer — so he reads in the brief placed before him on his first morning — is Britain’s reply to IBM. Once the engineers and programmers of International Computers have got these prototypes running, Atlas will be the biggest computer in the world, or at least the biggest that can be bought on the open market (the American military have computers of their own, of unrevealed power, and presumably the Russian military too). Atlas will strike a blow for the British computer industry from which IBM will take years to recover. That is what is at stake. That is why International Computers has assembled a team of bright young programmers, of whom he has now become one, in this rural retreat.

What is special about Atlas, what makes it unique among the world’s computers, is that it has self-consciousness of a kind. At regular intervals — every ten seconds, or even every second — it interrogates itself, asking itself what tasks it is performing and whether it is performing them with optimal efficiency. If it is not performing efficiently, it will rearrange its tasks and carry them out in a different, better order, thus saving time, which is money.

It will be his task to write the routine for the machine to follow at the end of each swing of the magnetic tape. Should it read another swing of tape, it must ask itself? Or should it, on the contrary, break off and read a punched card or a strip of paper tape? Should it write some of the output that has accumulated onto another magnetic tape, or should it do a burst of computing? These questions are to be answered according to the overriding principle of efficiency. He will have as much time as he needs (but preferably only six months, since International Computers is in a race against time) to reduce questions and answers to machine-readable code and test that they are optimally formulated. Each of his fellow programmers has a comparable task and a similar schedule. Meanwhile, engineers at the University of Manchester will be working day and night to perfect the electronic hardware. If all goes according to plan, Atlas will go into production in 1965.