And the idea of not spoon-feeding a child. With his own practical classroom experience, young Vermaak could detect that there was, in the originator of that maxim relating to the science of imparting knowledge, an element of genius. Even if it was a Standard Five schoolchild asking a question as a trap, the riposte, “Now, now, you must try and work that one out for yourself,” was for the schoolmaster a perfect means of escape. It was the teaching profession’s sheet anchor, the custodian of the educator’s dignity and reputation for scholarship. “How many l’s in parallel, Meneer?” – “Try and find out for yourself, and then you come and tell me in the morning.”
Gysbert van Tonder had, in the meantime, been thinking.
“Look,” he said to young Vermaak, eventually, “did I get it right, that you said that you don’t know, lots of times, what the answer is when a child asks you something?”
“Of course, yes,” the schoolmaster said. “Well, I mean, just take some of the kind of questions, like –”
“You don’t know the answer?” Gysbert van Tonder repeated. “To a simple sort of question that a child asks? And you supposed to be an educated man? And then you had something to say about my brain – that my brain isn’t up to much.”
It was Gysbert van Tonder’s turn to wear a thin smile.
“Well, just take a few samples,” the schoolmaster said. “Such as ‘Does a luislang dream?’, ‘Why did my father say his hair stood on end when Oom Koos came to visit us and my father thought at first Oom Koos was a tax-collector?’, ‘Why doesn’t the sky fall?’, ‘Can a fly hear?’, ‘Why does Meneer’s cane go swish before it hits?’, ‘Why does a ghost go through the wall when there’s the window open?’ – Now, does anybody know, just straight out, the answers to questions like that? And what makes children ask questions like that?”
Gysbert van Tonder observed that young Vermaak was getting just like a schoolchild himself, asking those last few questions in the way he did.
“A child asks a thing because he wants to be informed, that’s all,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “It’s something a child doesn’t know yet, and that he would like to learn about. And so he asks his teacher. Because he doesn’t know, he asks. But I can see, from what Meneer Vermaak has been saying, how foolish it is with this new kind of education for a child to ask his teacher about something he doesn’t know. It’s because he’s so ignorant as not to know that his teacher hasn’t got the answer that he asks. The child hasn’t learnt, yet, that his teacher is a new kind of teacher who isn’t supposed to know anything.”
Gysbert van Tonder started off in what he intended to be a tone of gentle satire. But he got more and more worked up as he talked.
“The child doesn’t know, yet, that his teacher is just a pudding-faced ass,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked. That was where it was different when he went to school, Gysbert van Tonder said, when they had just the old-fashioned kind of Hollander schoolmaster that had as likely as not been a sailor in his time, and had seen a thing or two, and had no frills about him. And if he didn’t quite know how to spell a word, he would at least guess. The old Hollander schoolmaster would never let on to the parents of his pupils that he could not answer even the simplest kind of questions. Nor would he so far forget himself as to suggest that a respected Marico farmer seated opposite him in a public post office had something the matter with his head.
Jurie Steyn was inclined to agree with Gysbert van Tonder.
“After all, those questions that the schoolmaster has mentioned, that he gets asked in class,” Jurie Steyn said, “well, I don’t pretend to be a very highly educated man, myself, although I can hold my own with the next man, I think, when it comes to book learning. But I don’t think that those questions are too hard to answer, especially for a person that takes a bit of notice of what’s going on around him.
“I mean, that one about the ghost, now. Why, has anybody ever heard of a ghost coming through a door – unless it’s a locked door – when there’s a wall for him to come through? It stands to reason that a ghost isn’t going to climb through any open window when there’s a two-foot-thick wall of sun-baked bricks for him to walk through, and him out to scare you all he can. It’s just because he is a ghost that he doesn’t look around for an open window to rest his knee on the ledge of before jumping in. A ghost has got more sense than that. More sense than a child that asks such a question – and more sense than a schoolteacher that doesn’t know the answer, too, I’m thinking.”
Or about a schoolchild’s father saying that his hair stood on end when somebody called round that might have been the tax-collector from Zeerust, Chris Welman said. Well, it might almost have been his own child that asked the question, by the sound of it, Chris Welman said. And how else otherwise did the schoolmaster expect a farmer in such a situation to act up, Chris Welman wanted to know.
Apart from asking the visitor would he sit down and have a brandy – perhaps several brandies: say five or six full-strength peach brandies, before trying to talk, seeing that the visitor must have travelled a good distance for the best part of a hot day and on an empty stomach – how otherwise did the schoolmaster expect a farmer of the Groot Marico to carry on when there was a tax-collector come to see him? Did the schoolmaster think that the Marico farmer would just bring out a photograph album for the tax-collector to look through while he was sitting in the farmer’s voorkamer, Chris Welman asked.
“And about the sky falling down,” Chris Welman added. “Well, you do sort of wish that the sky could fall down, then, when you’re in that situation. Or that the ground you’re standing on could disappear from underneath your feet, then. You know that it’s too much to hope for that the ground will disappear from underneath the polished-shoes feet of the tax-collector, I mean.”
Between At Naudé, Gysbert van Tonder, Jurie Steyn and Chris Welman, a pretty satisfactory set of answers was found to most of the questions posed by the schoolmaster in behoof of his pupils seeking enlightenment.
Only Oupa Bekker looked, at times, doubtful. He had lived a long time in the world, Oupa Bekker said, and so, for that reason, he could not feel that young Vermaak was wrong, altogether. He had, with the years, grown more than a little sceptical of the facile exposition, Oupa Bekker gave to understand. The happy solution, the neat definition, the striking story illustrative – as he grew older, they did not, somehow, weigh with him so much, Oupa Bekker confessed.
“As often as not a thing is quite different from how it looks,” was the way Oupa Bekker expressed it. “And a puzzle is a puzzle. The older I get, the more I think like that. So I wouldn’t like to say that the schoolmaster has got it all back to front. There’s life, now, for instance. And just look how long I’ve lived. And yet I feel, life … can anybody tell me what it’s all about, anyway?”
Young Vermaak’s eyes twinkled.
“Now, now, Oupa Bekker,” he said. “That’s something you’ve got to work out for yourself. You don’t expect me to spoon-feed you, do you?”
Bekkersdal Centenary
We were talking about the centenary celebrations at Bekkersdal. They were doing it in real style, we said, and it gave us a deep sense of pride, in this part of the Marico, to think that our town, that we had regarded as just being there, kind of, should have so impressive and stirring a history, and what was more, a future resplendent with opportunity and promise.
“Well, I had never thought of Bekkersdal in quite that way before,” Chris Welman said, “but when I went in week before last to have this tooth pulled out” – he inserted a couple of toil-discoloured fingers in his mouth to disclose the cavity – “I did notice a few of these centenary things they were talking about.”
Chris Welman made some further remarks, but there was a certain lack of precision in his articulation through his holding his mouth open that way while he was talking. It did not contribute to a clarity of diction – Chris Welman uttering sounds with his jaws prised apart and his tongue moving up and down behind his fingers.
&
nbsp; After Jurie Steyn had said that with Chris Welman having his mouth so wide it was like there was a draught in his post office that he hadn’t noticed before, and after young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, had explained about how he had been trembling, all the time, in fear that one of Chris Welman’s fingers might slip into a part of his mouth where the teeth were still all in, and so get bitten off – in his classical studies at University he had read about a boxer who, having stopped one from a Greek boxing-glove, was spitting out teeth, the schoolmaster said, and he did not feel happy at the thought of somebody spitting out fingers on the floor of Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer – after all that, Chris Welman said that he had a good mind not to go on talking anymore about his impressions of the Bekkersdal 100th-year celebrations, seeing how unappreciative we were.
And as for the Greek boxing-gloves that the schoolmaster had mentioned as what he had learnt about in the classics, Chris Welman said, well, they didn’t seem, by the sound of it, to be much different from the brass boxing-gloves that members of the Jeppe gang just wore over the knuckles of the right hand.
And he did not think that the Jeppe gang were students of the classics so that you would notice it, much, Chris Welman said.
Thereupon At Naudé remarked that Chris Welman having a tooth out in Bekkersdal wasn’t really of historical importance. It wasn’t of much significance one way or the other, he reckoned. Especially today, with the newspapers and the wireless having a lot to say about Bekkersdal’s centenary.
“If it had been a Voortrekker leader that had a tooth pulled out there a hundred years ago, it would have been different, perhaps,” At Naudé continued. “If it had been the Voortrekker leader Andries Loggenberg, say, and it had been the time of the trouble between the Hervormde church and the Doppers, say – well, that would have been something.
“With Andries Loggenberg having his face all bandaged up, I mean, through the way they had of pulling out a back tooth a hundred years ago, well, he just wouldn’t have been able to get onto an ox-wagon, then, and make a two-hour speech straight out of the Bible about what a blot on this part of the Dwarsberge the Cape Groote Kerk was.
“All he would be able to do, with his face all swathed in cloth like that, just his eyes and a piece of beard sticking out, would be to join a little in the hymn-singing afterwards perhaps, singing a few of the easier bass notes, that would still sound all right coming from behind the folds of dressing.”
All the same, At Naudé informed us, we would be surprised to know what progress had been made in Bekkersdal in recent years. We would not perhaps observe it so much ourselves, he said, just going there to buy things, or to take produce to the market or to drop in for a talk with the bank manager to find out could we draw a little against next year’s substantial cheques from the creamery that we were sure to get.
Indeed, it was actually in the course of a friendly exchange of views in that manner with the bank manager – the inkpot as likely as not upsetting on his desk from the way you were banging it to show him how amicable you felt towards him – that you might be inclined to feel that Bekkersdal had a considerable amount of leeway to make up, At Naudé said.
A ten-minute conversation with the bank manager could, At Naudé proceeded, leave you quite flabbergasted at the thought that Bekkersdal was only a hundred years old. The cobwebbed absence of forward-thinking, At Naudé said, the inability to keep pace with modern development that you encountered in that office with the leather-upholstered easy-chairs that the doorman conducted you into when you had an up-to-date idea for the bank to be able to benefit itself by, was really astounding, seeing that the bank had to pay out nothing more than, immediately, a few hundred pounds in cash.
“‘You’ve got Founded in 1875 on the front of the bank, Mr Coetsee,’ I said to the bank manager last time,” At Naudé informed us, “and I said to him, ‘I see the one is so worn, you can hardly read it anymore, through the years of wind and rain. And I think, well, you should just let it weather like that, Mr Coetsee. Because, from the ideas going on in here, it wouldn’t be far wrong for this bank to have in front Founded in 875.’”
We felt that At Naudé was using rather a lot of words to tell us that he didn’t get an overdraft. Well, we had more than one of us had that same difficulty. But we weren’t so expansive about it. We merely said, in a few well-chosen words – short words – just what we thought of Mr Coetsee. And we said it, always, when Mr Coetsee wasn’t there.
“But in other ways,” At Naudé went on, when he saw that he wasn’t getting any sympathy from us, “the town of Bekkersdal is advancing with rapid strides. There has been a lot over the wireless and in the newspapers about it. The newspapers have had mostly photographs and the wireless has had mostly what the Town Clerk says. Take population, now.
“Well, I read about the increase in population in the newspapers and I heard it over the wireless. Did you know that there has been an increase in the white population of Bekkersdal during the last ten years of over eighteen percent? No, I didn’t, either, but there has. And there has also been an increase in the native population. But the biggest increase of all – and the Town Clerk talking over the wireless coughed a bit uncomfortably when he said it – was in the Indian population.
“And then, what do you think is Bekkersdal’s income? No, I don’t know the exact figures, either. But it’s big, I tell you. It’s big, not only for a municipality the size of Bekkersdal, but it’s big also for a municipality a lot bigger. That’s how everything that’s going on in Bekkersdal is, it’s big.”
Because At Naudé was not able to quote exact figures, Chris Welman could revert to his eye-witness account of his recent visit to Bekkersdal that happened to coincide with some of the less exuberant features of the town’s preparations for its centenary festival.
“I couldn’t enjoy anything very much, of course,” Chris Welman said, “on account of my tooth. I mean, even after it was pulled it was just as sore, almost, as if it was still in. Except that, when it was still in, I didn’t have to look every twenty yards or so for a likely place, not exactly in the street and not exactly on the sidewalk either, where I could spit – seeing that my tooth went on bleeding all day.
“Well, anyway, that was one thing I found out about a town, then. How hard it is, in a town, to find a place to spit. I mean, when you’re on a farm, and you’ve got a few thousand morgen, none of it under irrigation, you can then just spit anywhere. And it needn’t be because you’ve had a tooth out, either. Or because of the plug of chewing tobacco that you’ve got in your mouth. Or because of something you’ve just thought of.
“The thing is that on a farm you can just spit anywhere, and for no reason, and without thinking about it again. If you’re taking a walk along the edge of your mealie-land, for instance, and there’s been no rain, and you see what’s coming up, on your mealie-land, and more particularly what isn’t coming up – and you happen to remember that you sowed there – why, there’s no place at all, then, on the edge of your mealie-land, that you aren’t allowed to come to a stop and stand and spit. And you can’t do that just anywhere you like to in a town.
“But what I did come across quite a lot of in Bekkersdal was how enthusiastic everybody was about the progress the place was making. Like one man said to me how his daughter had been picked to dance in the Volkspele part of the hundred-year birthday celebrations of Bekkersdal. ‘I don’t mean she’s dancing, actually,’ he said to me. ‘My wife and I would never allow that, of course. All my daughter does is she moves in Voortrekker costume in time to the boereorkes music – and you simply can’t keep your feet still, when it’s boereorkes music – and she is partnered by a young man also in Voortrekker costume, and she springs, too, naturally, when it comes to that portion of the boereorkes music, and the young man in Voortrekker costume springs, too, when it comes there, because he would look silly if he didn’t just then, spring, but of course, I would never allow my daughter to dance.’ They’re holding the Volkspele on that piece of
vacant ground where the next jam factory is going to be. How’s that for progress, hey?”
Except for the schoolmaster, who said that it sounded a bit sticky – the jam factory part of it, he meant – we agreed that Bekkersdal was indeed making an impressive-sounding advance.
“And that old building with the thick walls and the small window-panes and the gable,” Chris Welman went on, “that we called the old drostdy, standing right there in the middle of the main street – it must have been one of the first buildings they put up in Bekkersdal: I mean, it was just about stinking with age, what with those cracked tamboetie-wood ceiling beams and those ridiculous iron gates that they say came from … oh, I just can’t remember now, but they were so heavy, you could hardly push them open – well, the old drostdy is gone, now.
“You’ve got no idea how different the main street looks. A man with a camera who came to photograph the old drostdy cried when he saw that it wasn’t there anymore. But they told him that he didn’t have to worry, because that was where the new bioscope was going up that would have electric signs at night that you could see as far as Sephton’s Nek. And he could come and photograph the new bioscope in a few months’ time, they said to the man with the camera who was looking around him in a lost way, crying.”
Right in our own time, too, we said, and never mind about the centen-ary celebrations, there had been a lot of progress made in Bekkersdal. Look at the year they chopped down all those oak-trees, we said, that lined the road going to the north. At least five miles of old oak-trees they must have chopped down, we said. And, well, how was that for advance? Didn’t that show that Bekkersdal was really getting somewhere? On the map, wasn’t Bekkersdal getting somewhere, we asked.
When people hinted, sometimes, that we weren’t keeping pace with the on-coming floodtide of civilisation here in the Marico, well, there were a few things we could draw their attention to, all right. We spoke at considerable length, then, and Chris Welman was able to acquaint us with some of the details, that he had heard in the town, of the size of the sideshows that were going to be erected by the merry-go-round people who had contracted to help with the centenary celebrations.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 45