Life Times
Page 11
There was as yet no other child in the tribe’s school who was ready for Standard Six. It was difficult to see what could be done, now, but send Praise back over the border to school. So Miss Graham-Grigg decided it would have to be Father Audry. There was nothing else for it. The only alternative was the mission school, those damned Jesuits who’d been sitting in the Protectorate since the days when the white imperialists were on the grab, taking the tribes under their ‘protection’ – and the children the boy would be in class with there wouldn’t provide any sort of stimulation, either. So it would have to be Father Audry, and South Africa. He was a priest, too, an Anglican one, but his school was a place where at least, along with the pious pap, a black child could get an education as good as a white child’s.
When Praise came out into the veld with the other boys his eyes screwed up, against the size: the land ran away all round, and there was no other side to be seen; only the sudden appearance of the sky, that was even bigger. The wind made him snuff like a dog. He stood helpless as the country men he had seen caught by changing traffic lights in the middle of a street. The bits of space between buildings came together, ballooned uninterruptedly over him, he was lost; but there were clouds as big as the buildings had been, and even though space was vaster than any city, it was peopled by birds. If you ran for ten minutes into the veld the village was gone; but down low on the ground thousands of ants knew their way between their hard mounds that stood up endlessly as the land.
He went to herd cattle with the other boys early in the mornings and after school. He taught them some gambling games they had never heard of. He told them about the city they had never seen. The money in the old man’s hat seemed a lot to them, who had never got more than a few pennies when the mail train stopped for water at the halt five miles away; so the sum grew in his own estimation, too, and he exaggerated it a bit. In any case, he was forgetting about the city; in a way; not Miss Graham-Grigg’s way, but in the manner of a child, who makes, like a wasp building with his own spittle, his private context within the circumstance of his surroundings, so that the space around him was reduced to the village, the pan where the cattle were taken to drink, the halt where the train went by; whatever particular patch of sand or rough grass astir with ants the boys rolled on, heads together, among the white egrets and the cattle. He learnt from the others what roots and leaves were good to chew, and how to set wire traps for spring-hares. Though Miss Graham-Grigg had said he need not, he went to church with the children on Sundays.
He did not live where she did, in one of the Chief’s houses, but with the family of one of the other boys; but he was at her house often. She asked him to copy letters for her. She cut things out of the newspapers she got and gave them to him to read; they were about aeroplanes, and dams being built, and the way the people lived in other countries. ‘Now you’ll be able to tell the boys all about the Volta Dam, that is also in Africa – far from here – but still, in Africa,’ she said, with that sudden smile that reddened her face. She had a gramophone and she played records for him. Not only music, but people reading out poems, so that he knew that the poems in the school reader were not just short lines of words, but more like songs. She gave him tea with plenty of sugar and she asked him to help her to learn the language of the tribe, to talk to her in it. He was not allowed to call her madam or missus, as he did the white women who had put money in the hat, but had to learn to say Miss Graham-Grigg.
Although he had never known any white women before except as high-heeled shoes passing quickly in the street, he did not think that all white women must be like her; in the light of what he had seen white people, in their cars, their wealth, their distance, to be, he understood nothing that she did. She looked like them, with her blue eyes, blonde hair and skin that was not one colour but many – brown where the sun burned it, red when she blushed – but she lived here in the Chief’s houses, drove him in his car, and sometimes slept out in the fields with the women when they were harvesting kaffircorn far from the village. He did not know why she had brought him there, or why she should be kind to him. But he could not ask her, any more than he would have asked her why she went out and slept in the fields when she had a gramophone and a lovely gas lamp (he had been able to repair it for her) in her room. If when they were talking together, the talk came anywhere near the pitch outside the post office, she became slowly very red, and they went past it, either by falling silent or (on her part) talking and laughing rather fast.
That was why he was amazed the day she told him that he was going back to Johannesburg. As soon as she had said it she blushed darkly for it, her eyes pleading confusion: so it was really from her that the vision of the pitch outside the post office came again. But she was already speaking: ‘—to school. To a really good boarding school, Father Audry’s school, about nine miles from town. You must get your chance at a good school, Praise. We really can’t teach you properly any longer. Maybe you’ll be the teacher here, yourself, one day. There’ll be a high school and you’ll be the headmaster.’
She succeeded in making him smile; but she looked sad, uncertain. He went on smiling because he couldn’t tell her about the initiation school that he was about to begin with the other boys of his age group. Perhaps someone would tell her. The other women. Even the Chief. But you couldn’t fool her with smiling.
‘You’ll be sorry to leave Tebedi and Joseph and the rest.’
He stood there, smiling.
‘Praise, I don’t think you understand about yourself – about your brain.’ She gave a little sobbing giggle, prodded at her own head. ‘You’ve got an awfully good one. More in there than other boys – you know? It’s something special – it would be such a waste. Lots of people would like to be clever like you, but it’s not easy, when you are the clever one—?’
He went on smiling. He did not want her face looking into his any more and so he fixed his eyes on her feet, white feet in sandals with the veins standing out over the ankles like the feet of Christ dangling above his head in the church.
Adelaide Graham-Grigg had met Father Audry before, of course. All those white people who do not accept the colour bar in Southern Africa seem to know each other, however different the bases of their rejection. She had sat with him on some committee or other in London a few years earlier, along with a couple of exiled white South African leftists and a black nationalist leader. Anyway, everyone knew him – from the newspapers if nowhere else: he had been warned, in a public speech by the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Verwoerd, that the interference of a churchman in political matters would not be tolerated. He continued to speak his mind, and (as the newspapers quoted him) ‘to obey the commands of God before the dictates of the State’. He had close friends among African and Indian leaders, and it was said that he even got on well with certain ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, that, in fact, he was behind some of the dissidents who now and then questioned Divine Sanction for the colour bar – such was the presence of his restless, black-cassocked figure, stammering eloquence and jagged handsome face.
He had aged since she saw him last; he was less handsome. But he had still what he would have as long as he lived: the unconscious bearing of a natural prince among men that makes a celebrated actor, a political leader, a successful lover; an object of attraction and envy who, whatever his generosity of spirit, is careless of one cruelty for which other people will never forgive him – the distinction, the luck with which he was born.
He was tired and closed his eyes in a grimace straining at concentration when he talked to her, yet in spite of this she felt the dimness of the candle of her being within his radius. Everything was right, with him; nothing was quite right with her. She was only thirty-six but she had never looked any younger. Her eyes were the bright shy eyes of a young woman but her feet and hands with their ridged nails had the look of tension and suffering of extremities that would never caress: she saw it, he saw it, she knew in his presence that they were deprived for ever.
Father Audry smiled at what he knew he was expected to come out with: that if the boy chose the way of the Lord, etc.
He said, ‘What you want is someone who will turn out to be an able politician without challenging the tribal system.’
They both laughed, but, again, he had unconsciously taken the advantage of admitting their deeply divergent views; he believed the chiefs must go, while she, of course, saw no reason why Africans shouldn’t develop their own tribal democracy instead of taking over the Western pattern.
‘Well, he’s a little young for us to be worrying about that now, don’t you think . . . ?’ He smiled. There were a great many papers on his desk and she had the sense of pressure of his preoccupation with other things. ‘What about the Lemeribe Mission? What’s the teaching like these days – I used to know Father Chalmon when he was there—’
‘I wouldn’t send him to those people,’ she said spiritedly, implying that he knew her views on missionaries and their role in Africa. In this atmosphere of candour they discussed Praise’s background. Father Audry suggested that the boy should be encouraged to resume relations with his family, once he was back within reach of Johannesburg.
‘They’re pretty awful.’
‘It would be best for him to acknowledge what he was, if he is to accept what he is to become.’ He got up with a swish of his black skirts and strode, stooping in the opened door, to call, ‘Simon, bring the boy.’ Miss Graham-Grigg was smiling excitedly towards the doorway, all the will to love pacing behind the bars of her glance.
Praise entered in the navy-blue shorts and white shirt of his new school uniform. The woman’s kindness, the man’s attention, got him in the eyes like the sun striking off the pan where the cattle had been taken to drink. Father Audry came from England, Miss Graham-Grigg had told him, like herself. That was what they were, these two white people who were not like any white people he had seen to be. What they were was being English. From far off; six thousand miles from here, as he knew from his geography book.
Praise did very well at the new school. He sang in the choir in the big church on Sundays; his body, that was to have been made a man’s out in the bush, was hidden under the white robes. The boys smoked in the lavatories and once there was a girl who came and lay down for them in a storm-water ditch behind the workshops. He knew all about these things from before, on the streets and in the location where he had slept in one room with a whole family. But he did not tell the boys about the initiation. The women had not said anything to Miss Graham-Grigg. The Chief hadn’t, either. Soon when Praise thought about it he realised that by now it must be over. Those boys must have come back from the bush. Miss Graham-Grigg had said that after a year, when Christmas came, she would fetch him for the summer holidays. She did come and see him twice that first year, when she was down in Johannesburg, but he couldn’t go back with her at Christmas because Father Audry had him in the Nativity play, and was giving him personal coaching in Latin and algebra. Father Audry didn’t actually teach in the school at all – it was ‘his’ school simply because he had begun it, and it was run by the Order of which he was Father Provincial – but the reports of the boy’s progress were so astonishing that, as he said to Miss Graham-Grigg, one felt one must give him all the mental stimulation one could.
‘I begin to believe we may be able to sit him for his matric when he is just sixteen.’ Father Audry made the pronouncement with the air of doing so at the risk of sounding ridiculous.
Miss Graham-Grigg always had her hair done when she got to Johannesburg, she was looking pretty and optimistic. ‘D’you think he could do a Cambridge entrance? My committee in London would set up a scholarship, I’m sure – investment in a future Prime Minister for the Chief!’
When Praise was sent for, she said she hardly knew him; he hadn’t grown much, but he looked so grown-up, with his long trousers and glasses. ‘You really needn’t wear them when you’re not working,’ said Father Audry. ‘Well, I suppose if you take ’em on and off you keep leaving them about, eh?’ They both stood back, smiling, letting the phenomenon embody in the boy.
Praise saw that she had never been reminded by anyone about the initiation. She began to give him news of his friends, Tebedi and Joseph and the others, but when he heard their names they seemed to belong to people he couldn’t see in his mind.
Father Audry talked to him sometimes about what Father called his ‘family’, and when first he came to the school he had been told to write to them. It was a well-written, well-spelled letter in English, exactly the letter he presented as a school exercise when one was required in class. They didn’t answer. Then Father Audry must have made private efforts to get in touch with them, because the old woman, a couple of children who had been babies when he left and one of his grown-up ‘sisters’ came to the school on a visiting day. They had to be pointed out to him among the other boys’ visitors; he would not have known them, nor they him.
He said, ‘Where’s my uncle?’ – because he would have known him at once; he had never grown out of the slight stoop of the left shoulder where the weight of the old man’s hand had impressed the young bone. But the old man was dead.
Father Audry came up and put a long arm round the bent shoulder and another long arm round one of the small children and said from one to the other: ‘Are you going to work hard and learn a lot like your brother?’ and the small black child stared up into the nostrils filled with strong hair, the tufted eyebrows, the red mouth surrounded by the pale jowl dark-pored with beard beneath the skin, and then down, torn by fascination, to the string of beads that hung from the leather belt.
They did not come again, but Praise did not much miss visitors because he spent more and more time with Father Audry. When he was not actually being coached, he was set to work to prepare his lessons or do his reading in the Father’s study, where he could concentrate as one could not hope to do up at the school. Father Audry taught him chess as a form of mental gymnastics, and was jubilant the first time Praise beat him. Praise went up to the house for a game nearly every evening after supper. He tried to teach the other boys but after the first ten minutes of explanation of moves, someone would bring out the cards or dice and they would all play one of the old games that were played in the streets and yards and locations. Johannesburg was only nine miles away; you could see the lights.
Father Audry rediscovered what Miss Graham-Grigg had found – that Praise listened attentively to music, serious music. One day Father Audry handed the boy the flute that had lain for years in its velvet-lined box that bore still the little silver nameplate: Rowland Audry. He watched while Praise gave the preliminary swaying wriggle and assumed the bent-kneed stance of all the urchin performers Father Audry had seen, and then tried to blow down it in the shy, fierce attack of penny whistle music. Father Audry took it out of his hands. ‘It’s what you’ve just heard there.’ Bach’s unaccompanied flute sonata lay on the record player. Praise smiled and frowned, giving his glasses a lift with his nose – a habit he was developing. ‘But you’ll soon learn to play it the right way round,’ said Father Audry, and with the lack of self-consciousness that comes from the habit of privilege, put the flute to his mouth and played what he remembered after ten years.
He taught Praise not only how to play the flute, but also the elements of musical composition, so that he should not simply play by ear, or simply listen with pleasure, but also understand what it was that he heard. The flute-playing was much more of a success with the boys than the chess had been, and on Saturday nights, when they sometimes made up concerts, he was allowed to take it to the hostel and play it for them. Once he played in a show for white people, in Johannesburg; but the
boys could not come to that; he could only tell them about the big hall at the university, the jazz band, the African singers and dancers with their red lips and straightened hair, like white women.
The one thing that dissatisfied Father Audry was that the boy had not filled out and grown as much as one would have expected. He made it a rule that Praise must spend more time on physical exercise – the school couldn’t afford a proper gymnasium, but there was some equipment outdoors. The trouble was that the boy had so little time; even with his exceptional ability, it was not going to be easy for a boy with his lack of background to matriculate at sixteen. Brother George, his form master, was certain he could be made to bring it off; there was a specially strong reason why everyone wanted him to do it since Father Audry had established that he would be eligible for an open scholarship that no black boy had ever won before – what a triumph that would be, for the boy, for the school, for all the African boys who were considered fit only for the inferior standard of ‘Bantu education’! Perhaps some day this beggar-child from the streets of Johannesburg might even become the first black South African to be a Rhodes Scholar. This was what Father Audry jokingly referred to as Brother George’s ‘sin of pride’. But who knew? It was not inconceivable. So far as the boy’s physique was concerned – what Brother George said was probably true: ‘You can’t feed up for those years in the streets.’