Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [56]
Next door live a couple newly arrived from England. The man is forever washing his car; the woman, wearing red shorts and sunglasses, spends her days in a deckchair sunning her long white legs.
The immediate task is to find schools for him and his brother. Cape Town is not like Worcester, where all the boys went to the boys’ school and all the girls to the girls’ school. In Cape Town there are schools to choose among, some of them good schools, some not. To get into a good school you need contacts, and they have few contacts.
Through the influence of his mother’s brother Lance they get an interview at Rondebosch Boys’ High. Dressed neatly in his shorts and shirt and tie and navy-blue blazer with the Worcester Boys’ Primary badge on the breast pocket, he sits with his mother on a bench outside the headmaster’s office. When their turn comes they are ushered into a wood-panelled room full of photographs of rugby and cricket teams. The headmaster’s questions are all addressed to his mother: where they live, what his father does. Then comes the moment he has been waiting for. From her handbag she produces the report that proves he was first in class and that ought therefore to open all doors to him.
The headmaster puts on his reading-glasses. ‘So you came first in your class,’ he says. ‘Good, good! But you won’t find it so easy here.’
He had hoped to be tested: to be asked the date of the battle of Blood River, or, even better, to be given some mental arithmetic. But that is all, the interview is over. ‘I can make no promises,’ says the headmaster. ‘His name will go down on the waiting list, then we must hope for a withdrawal.’
His name goes down on the waiting lists of three schools, with no success. Coming first in Worcester is evidently not good enough for Cape Town.
The last resort is the Catholic school, St Joseph’s. St Joseph’s has no waiting list: they will take anyone prepared to pay their fees, which for non-Catholics are twelve pounds a quarter.
What is being brought home to them, to him and his mother, is that in Cape Town different classes of people attend different schools. St Joseph’s caters for, if not the lowest class, then the second lowest. Her failure to get him into a better school leaves his mother bitter but does not affect him. He is not sure what class they belong to, where they fit in. For the present he is content merely to get by. The threat of being sent to an Afrikaans school and consigned to an Afrikaans life has receded – that is all that matters. He can relax. He does not even have to go on pretending to be a Catholic.
The real English do not go to a school like St Joseph’s. On the streets of Rondebosch, on their way to and from their own schools, he can see the real English every day, can admire their straight blond hair and golden skins, their clothes that are never too small or too large, their quiet confidence. They josh each other (a word he knows from the public-school stories he has read) in an easy way, without the raucousness and clumsiness he is used to. He has no aspiration to join them, but he watches closely and tries to learn.
The boys from Diocesan College, who are the most English of all and do not condescend even to play rugby or cricket against St Joseph’s, live in select areas that, being far from the railway line, he hears of but never sees: Bishopscourt, Fernwood, Constantia. They have sisters who go to schools like Herschel and St Cyprian’s, whom they genially watch over and protect. In Worcester he had rarely laid eyes on a girl: his friends seemed always to have brothers, not sisters. Now he glimpses for the first time the sisters of the English, so golden-blonde, so beautiful, that he cannot