Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savings for fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at Jackson’s farm, and I lay awake all night tortured—man, but tortured!—thinking of that poor silly bugger and his dad’s life savings. Because, my God, if I was stuck out on that Reserve 150 miles from anywhere on £6 a month I’d drink myself to death in a month, man. Next morning I woke up more dead than alive, having decided I was going to clear out of this bloody country—no, really, I can’t stand it, I’m going—when who should I see but Joshua on his bicycle? He had cycled 20 miles since dawn through the bush with a chicken. The chicken was for me. You could have knocked me down with a—I said to him, “Damn it, you poor fool, Joshua, damn it! I’ve given you the sack, I’ve ruined your life, now you’ll have to go off and dig a ditch somewhere, and you bring me a chicken. Have a heart,” I said, “don’t do that to me.” “Sir,” he said. “It came into my heart last night to bring you a chicken. It is for you, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that off he went back to his bicycle. So I brought the chicken home, and here was my wife with psychological troubles, and my kids, damned spoilt brats who are so blasé and full of experience from the pictures they can’t get a thrill out of anything, and the big baas, that’s me. And the happy family, we ate that poor bastard’s chicken, and I don’t know why it didn’t choke us.’
‘Now, now, darling,’ said his wife, ‘you must keep a sense of proportion.’
After two and a half hours I had reached the door of the office. It seems that this was the time of the year for renewing licences, and so the whole countryside moves into town for that purpose, and patiently queues behind the single counter that does duty for the ordinary run of business during the rest of the year. Then I discovered I was in the wrong queue, so I started again. At last, I was told I must go to an inner office; and the official invited me to do so through an inside passage, because otherwise I would have to pass through a crowd of natives, and I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?
Inside there was a nice girl, who in the best tradition of the country, which is to have no respect for institutions, said, ‘Well, I can’t help you, because that silly lot of MPs we’ve got have absent-mindedly passed a law saying that everyone who loses his licence must take another driving test. I expect when they’ve noticed what they’ve done, they’ll change it back again, but in the meantime I think you’ve had it, because there’s queues miles long of people waiting to be tested for new licences and I can only hope there are some MPs among them.’
‘But last time I lost my licence,’ I said, ‘all I did was to go to the office and they looked up a file and gave me a new one.’
‘That was in the good old days. That was before Federation. No, things aren’t what they used to be. And besides, it seems the files have got mislaid.’
So I went back to the house and telephoned the police at Banket where sometime in the ’thirties I was given my licence by