Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [53]
‘Sies!’ says one of the other customers.
He wants to protest: ‘What must I do? Must I not spit? Must I swallow the fly? I am just a child!’ But explanations count for nothing among these merciless people. He wipes the spit off the counter with his hand and amid disapproving silence pays for the cigarettes.
Reminiscing about the old days on the farm, his father and his father’s brothers come once again to the subject of their own father. ‘’n Ware ou jintlman!’ they say, a real old gentleman, repeating their formula for him, and laugh: ‘Dis wat hy op sy grafsteen sou gewens het: A farmer and a gentleman’ – That’s what he would have liked on his gravestone. They laugh most of all because their father continued to wear riding boots when everyone else on the farm wore velskoen.
His mother, listening to them, sniffs scornfully. ‘Don’t forget how frightened you were of him,’ she says. ‘You were afraid to light a cigarette in front of him, even when you were grown men.’
They are abashed, they have no reply: she has clearly touched a nerve.
His grandfather, the one with the gentlemanly pretensions, once owned not only the farm and a half-share in the hotel and general dealer’s store at Fraserburg Road, but a house in Merweville with a flagpole in front of it on which he hoisted the Union Jack on the King’s birthday.
‘’n Ware ou jintlman en ’n ware ou jingo!’ add the brothers: a real old jingo! Again they laugh.
His mother is right about them. They sound like children saying naughty words behind a parent’s back. Anyway, by what right do they make fun of their father? But for him they would not speak English at all: they would be like their neighbours the Botes and the Nigrinis, stupid and heavy, with no conversation except about sheep and the weather. At least when the family gets together there is a babble of jokes and laughter in a mishmash of tongues; whereas when the Nigrinis or the Botes come visiting the air at once turns sombre and heavy and dull. ‘Ja-nee,’ say the Botes, sighing. ‘Ja-nee,’ say the Coetzees, and pray that their guests will hurry up and leave.
What of himself? If the grandfather he reveres was a jingo, must he be a jingo too? Can a child be a jingo? He stands to attention when ‘God Save the King’ is played in the bioscope and the Union Jack waves on the screen. Bagpipe music sends a shiver down his spine, as do words like stalwart, valorous. Should he keep it a secret, this attachment of his to England?
He cannot understand why it is that so many people around him dislike England. England is Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. England is doing one’s duty and accepting one’s fate in a quiet, unfussy way. England is the boy at the battle of Jutland, who stood by his guns while the deck was burning under his feet. England is Sir Lancelot of the Lake and Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood with his longbow of yew and his suit of Lincoln green. What do the Afrikaners have to compare? Dirkie Uys, who rode his horse till it died. Piet Retief, who was made a fool of by Dingaan. And then the Voortrekkers getting their revenge by shooting thousands of Zulus who didn’t have guns, and being proud of it.
There is a Church of England church in Worcester, and a clergyman with grey hair and a pipe who doubles as Scoutmaster and whom some of the English boys in his class – the proper English boys, with English names and homes in the old, leafy part of Worcester – refer to familiarly as Padre. When the English talk like that he falls silent. There is the English language, which he commands with ease. There is England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is loyal. But more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass.
Sixteen
Something has been arranged on the telephone, he does not know what, but it