Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [44]
One day his father comes to his room with the Wordsworth book. ‘You should read these,’ he says, and points out poems he has ticked in pencil. A few days later he comes back, wanting to discuss the poems. ‘The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion,’ his father quotes. ‘It’s great poetry, isn’t it?’ He mumbles, refuses to meet his father’s eye, refuses to play the game. It is not long before his father gives up.
He is not sorry about his churlishness. He cannot see how poetry fits into his father’s life; he suspects it is just pretence. When his mother says that in order to escape the mockery of her sisters she had to take her book and creep away in the loft, he believes her. But he cannot imagine his father, as a boy, reading poetry, who nowadays reads nothing but the newspaper. All he can imagine his father doing at that age is joking and laughing and smoking cigarettes behind the bushes.
He watches his father reading the newspaper. He reads quickly, nervously, flipping through the pages as though looking for something that is not there, cracking and slapping the pages as he turns them. When he is done with reading he folds the paper into a narrow panel and sets to work on the crossword puzzle.
His mother too reveres Shakespeare. She thinks Macbeth is Shakespeare’s greatest play. ‘If but the something could trammel up the consequences then it were,’ she gabbles, and comes to a stop; ‘and bring with his surcease success,’ she continues, nodding to keep the beat. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not wash this little hand,’ she adds. Macbeth was the play she studied in school; her teacher used to stand behind her, pinching her arm until she had recited the whole of the speech. ‘Kom nou, Vera!’ he would say – ‘Come on!’ – pinching her, and she would bring out a few more words.
What he cannot understand about his mother is that, though she is so stupid that she cannot help him with his Standard Four homework, her English is faultless, particularly when she writes. She uses words in their right sense, her grammar is faultless. She is at home in the language, it is an area where she cannot be shaken. How did it happen? Her father was Piet Wehmeyer, a flat Afrikaans name. In the photograph album, in his collarless shirt and wide-brimmed hat, he looks like any ordinary farmer. In the Uniondale district where they lived there were no English; all the neighbours seem to have been named Zondagh. Her own mother was born Marie du Biel, of German parents with not a drop of English blood in their veins. Yet when she had children she gave them English names – Roland, Winifred, Ellen, Vera, Norman, Lancelot – and spoke English to them at home. Where could they have learned English, she and Piet?
His father’s English is nearly as good, though his accent has more than a trace of Afrikaans in it and he says ‘thutty’ for ‘thirty’. His father is always turning the pages of the Pocket Oxford English Dictionary for his crossword puzzles. He seems at least distantly familiar with every word in the dictionary, and every idiom too. He pronounces the more nonsensical idioms with relish, as though consolidating them in his memory: pitch in, come a cropper.
He himself does not read further than Coriolanus in the Shakespeare book. But for the sports page and the comic strips, the newspaper bores him. When he has nothing else to read, he reads the green books. ‘Bring me a green book!’ he calls to his mother from his sickbed. The green books are Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, which have been travelling with them ever since he can remember. He has been through them