Scenes From Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime

by J. M. Coetzee

  Without experience of his own, he cannot take part in these conversations. Nevertheless, he knows that pain is not the most important consideration. If the other boys can bear the pain, then so can he, whose willpower is so much greater. What he will not be able to endure will be the shame. So bad will be the shame, he fears, so daunting, that he will hold tight to his desk and refuse to come when he is called out. And that will be a greater shame: it will set him apart, and set the other boys against him too. If it ever happens that he is called out to be beaten, there will be so humiliating a scene that he will never again be able to go back to school; in the end there will be no way out but to kill himself.

  So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

  The strange thing is, it will only take one beating to break the spell of terror that has him in its grip. He is well aware of this: if, somehow, he can be rushed through the beating before he has had time to turn to stone and resist, if the violation of his body can be achieved quickly, by force, he will be able to come out on the other side a normal boy, able to join easily in discussion of the teachers and their canes and the various grades and flavours of pain they inflict. But by himself he cannot leap that barrier.

  He puts the blame on his mother for not beating him. At the same time that he is glad he wears shoes and takes out books from the public library and stays away from school when he has a cold – all the things that set him apart – he is angry with his mother for not having normal children and making them live a normal life. His father, if his father were to take control, would turn them into a normal family. His father is normal in every way. He is grateful to his mother for protecting him from his father’s normality, that is to say, from his father’s occasional blue-eyed rages and threats to beat him. At the same time he is angry with his mother for turning him into something unnatural, something that needs to be protected if it is to continue to live.

  Among the canes it is not Miss Oosthuizen’s that leaves the deepest impression on him. The most fearsome cane is that of Mr Lategan the woodwork teacher. Mr Lategan’s cane is not long and springy in the style most of the teachers prefer. Instead it is short and thick and stubby, more a stick or a baton than a switch. It is rumoured that Mr Lategan uses it only on the older boys, that it will be too much for a younger boy. It is rumoured that with his cane Mr Lategan has made even Matric boys blubber and plead for mercy and urinate in their pants and disgrace themselves.

  Mr Lategan is a little man with close-cropped hair that stands upright, and a moustache. One of his thumbs is missing: the stub is neatly covered over with a purple scar. Mr Lategan hardly says anything. He is always in a distant, irritable mood, as though teaching woodwork to small boys is a task beneath him that he performs unwillingly. Through most of the lesson he stands at the window staring out over the quadrangle while the boys tentatively measure and saw and plane. Sometimes he has the stubby cane with him, idly tapping his trouser-leg while he ruminates. When he comes on his inspection round he disdainfully points to what is wrong, then with a shrug of the shoulders passes on.

  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.

  Three

  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’.

  Boy Scouts, he discovers, consists, like school, of passing examinations. For each examination you pass you get a badge, which you sew on to your shirt.

  Examinations are taken in a preordained sequence. The first examination is in tying knots: the reef knot and the double reef, the sheepshank, the bowline. He passes it, but without distinction. It is not clear to him how one passes these Boy Scout examinations with distinction, how one excels.

  The second examination is for a woodsman’s badge. To pass, he is required to light a fire, using no paper and striking no more than three matches. On the bare ground at the side of the Anglican church hall, on a winter’s evening with a cold wind blowing, he assembles his heap of twigs and scraps of bark, and then, with his troop leader and the scoutmaster observing, strikes his matches one by one. Each time the fire does not take: each time the wind blows out the tiny flame. The scoutmaster and troop leader turn away. They do not utter the words, ‘You have failed,’ so he is not sure that he has in fact failed. What if they are going off to confer and decide that, because of the wind, the test was unfair? He waits for them to come back. He waits for the woodsman’s badge to be given to him anyhow. But nothing happens. He stands by his pile of twigs and nothing happens.

  No one mentions it again. It is the first examination he has failed in his life.

  Every June vacation the Scout troop goes on a camp. Save for a week in hospital at the age of four he has never been away from his mother. But he is determined to go with the Scouts.

  There is a list of things to take. One is a groundsheet. His mother does not have a groundsheet, is not even sure what a groundsheet is. Instead she gives him an inflatable red rubber mattress. At the campsite he discovers that all the other boys have proper khaki-coloured groundsheets. His red mattress at once sets him apart. That is not all. He cannot bring himself to move his bowels over a stinking pit in the earth.

  On the third day of the camp they go swimming in the Breede River. Though, at the time when they lived in Cape Town, he and his brother and his cousin used to catch the train to Fish Hoek and spend whole afternoons clambering on the rocks and making castles in the sand and splashing in the waves, he does not actually know how to swim. Now, as a Boy Scout, he must swim across the river and back.

  He hates rivers for their murkiness, for the mud that oozes between his toes, for the rusty tin cans and broken bottles he could step on; he prefers clean white sea-sand. But he plunges in and somehow splashes across. On the far bank he clutches the root of a tree, finds a foothold, stands waist-deep in sullen brown water, his teeth chattering.

  The other boys turn and begin to swim back. He is left alone. There is nothing to do but launch himself back into the water.

  By midstream he is exhausted. He gives up swimming and tries to stand, but the river is too deep. His head goes under. He tries to lift himself, to swim again, but he has not the strength. He goes under a second time.

  He has a vision of his mother sitting on a chair with a high, straight back reading the letter that tells of his death. His brother stands at her side, reading over her shoulder.

  The next he knows, he is lying on the riverbank and his troop leader, whose name is Michael but whom he has been too shy to speak to, is straddling him. He closes his eyes, filled with well-being. He has been saved.

  For weeks afterwards he thinks of Michael, of how Michael risked his own life to plunge back into the river and rescue him. Each time it strikes him how wonderful it is that Michael should have noticed – noticed him, noticed that he was failing. Compared with Michael (who is in Standard Seven and has all except the most advanced badges and is going to be a King’s Scout) he is negligible. It would have been quite appropriate for Michael not to have seen him go under, even not to have missed him until they got back to camp. Then all that would have been required of Michael would have been to write the letter to his mother, the cool, formal letter beginning: ‘We regret to inform you…’

  From that day onward he knows there is something special about him. He should have died but he did not. Despite his unworthiness, he has been given a second life. He was dead but is alive.

  Of what passed at the camp he breathes not a word to his mother.

  Four

  The great secret of his school life, the secret he tells no one at home, is that he has become a Roman Catholic, that for all practical purposes he ‘is’ a Roman Catholic.

  The topic is difficult to raise at home because their family ‘is’ nothing. They are of course South Africans, but even South Africanness is faintly embarrassing, and therefore not talked about, since not everyone who lives in South Africa is a South African, or not a proper South African.

  In religion they
are certainly nothing. Not even in his father’s family, which is much safer and more ordinary than his mother’s, does anyone go to church. He himself has been in a church only twice in his life: once to be baptized and once to celebrate victory in World War Two.

  The decision to ‘be’ a Roman Catholic is made on the spur of the moment. On the first morning at his new school, while the rest of the class is marched off to assembly in the school hall, he and the three other new boys are kept behind. ‘What is your religion?’ asks the teacher of each of them. He glances right and left. What is the right answer? What religions are there to choose from? Is it like Russians and Americans? His turn comes. ‘What is your religion?’ asks the teacher. He is sweating, he does not know what to say. ‘Are you a Christian or a Roman Catholic or a Jew?’ she demands impatiently. ‘Roman Catholic,’ he says.

  When the questioning is over, he and another boy who says he is a Jew are motioned to stay behind; the two who say they are Christians go off to assembly.

  They wait to see what will happen to them. But nothing happens. The corridors are empty, the building is silent, there are no teachers left.

  They wander into the playground, where they join the rag-tag of other boys left behind. It is marbles season; in the unfamiliar hush of the empty grounds, with dove-calls in the air and the faint, far-off sound of singing, they play marbles. Time passes. Then the bell rings for the end of assembly. The rest of the boys return from the hall, marching in files, class by class. Some appear to be in a bad mood. ‘Jood!’ an Afrikaans boy hisses at him as he passes: Jew! When they rejoin their class, no one smiles.