In these two excerpts selected for the M&G by JMCoetzee from Boyhood, his new book, he recalls episodes of his early years in Worcester and Cape Town
The bicycle
They live on a housing estate outside the town of Worcester, between the railway line and the National Road. The streets of the estate have tree-names but no trees yet. Their address is No 12, Poplar Avenue. All the houses on the estate are new and identical. They are set in large plots of red clay earth where nothing grows, separated by wire fences. In each back yard stands a small block consisting of a room and a lavatory. Though they have no servant, they refer to these as the servants room and the servants lavatory. They use the servants room to store things in: newspapers, empty bottles, a broken chair, an old coir mattress.
At the bottom of the yard they put up a poultry-run and install three hens, which are supposed to lay eggs for them. But the hens do not flourish. Rainwater, unable to seep away in the clay, stands in pools in the yard. The poultry-run turns into an evil-smelling morass. The hens develop gross swellings on their legs, like elephant-skin. Sickly and cross, they cease to lay. His mother consults her sister in Stellenbosch, who says they will return to laying only after the horny shells under their tongues have been cut out. So one after another his mother takes the hens between her knees, presses on their jowls till they open their beaks, and with the point of a paring-knife picks at their tongues. The hens shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. He shudders and turns away. He thinks of his mother slapping stewing-steak down on the kitchen counter and cutting it into cubes; he thinks of her bloody fingers.
The nearest shops are a mile away along a bleak eucalyptus-lined road. Trapped in this box of a house on the housing estate, there is nothing for his mother to do all day but sweep and tidy. Every time the wind blows, a fine ochre clay-dust whirls in under the doors, seeps through the cracks in the window-frames, under the eaves, through the joints of the ceiling. After a day-long storm the dust lies piled inches high against the front wall.
They buy a vacuum cleaner. Every morning his mother trails the vacuum cleaner from room to room, sucking up the dust into the roaring belly on which a smiling red goblin leaps as if over a hurdle. A goblin: why?
He plays with the vacuum cleaner, tearing up paper and watching the strips fly up the pipe like leaves in the wind. He holds the pipe over a trail of ants, sucking them up to their death.
There are ants in Worcester, flies, plagues of fleas. Worcester is only 90 miles from Cape Town, yet everything is worse here. He has a
ring of fleabites above his socks, and scabs where he has
scratched. Some nights he cannot sleep for the itching. He does not see why they ever had to leave Cape Town.
His mother is restless too. I wish I had a horse, she says. Then at least I could go riding in the veld. A horse! says his father: Do you want to be Lady Godiva?
She does not buy a horse. Instead, without warning, she buys a bicycle, a womans model, second-hand, painted black. It is so huge and heavy that, when he experiments with it in the yard, he cannot turn the pedals.
She does not know how to ride a bicycle; perhaps she does not know how to ride a horse either. She bought the bicycle thinking that riding it would be a simple matter. Now she can find no one to teach her.
His father cannot hide his glee. Women do not ride bicycles, he says. His mother remains
defiant. I will not be a prisoner in this house, she says. I will be free.
At first he had thought it splendid that his mother should have her own bicycle. He had even pictured the three of them riding together down Poplar Avenue, she and he and his brother. But now, as he listens to his fathers jokes, which his mother can meet only with dogged silence, he begins to waver. Women dont ride bicycles: what if his father is right? If his mother can find no one willing to teach her, if no other housewife in Reunion Park has a bicycle, then perhaps women are indeed not supposed to ride bicycles.
Alone in the back yard, his mother tries to teach herself. Holding her legs out straight on either side, she rolls down the incline toward the chicken-run. The bicycle tips over and comes to a stop. Because it does not have a crossbar, she does not fall, merely staggers about in a silly way, clutching the handlebars.
His heart turns against her. That evening he joins in with his fathers jeering. He is well aware what a betrayal this is. Now his mother is all alone.
Nevertheless she does learn to ride, though in an uncertain, wobbling way, straining to turn the heavy cranks.
She makes her expeditions to Worcester in the mornings, when he is at school. Only once does he catch a glimpse of her on her bicycle. She is wearing a white blouse and a dark skirt. She is coming down Poplar Avenue toward the house. Her hair streams in the wind. She looks young, like a girl, young and fresh and mysterious.
Every time his father sees the heavy black bicycle leaning against the wall he makes jokes about it. In his jokes the citizens of Worcester interrupt their business to stand and gape as the woman on the bicycle labours past. Trap! Trap! they call out, mocking her. There is nothing funny about the jokes, though he and his father always laugh together afterwards. As for his mother, she never has any repartee, she is not gifted in that way. Laugh if you like, she says.
Then one day, without explanation, she stops riding the bicycle. Soon afterwards the bicycle disappears. No one says a word, but he knows she has been defeated, put in her place, and knows that he must bear part of the blame. I will make it up to her one day, he promises himself.
The memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping toward her own desire. He does not want her to go. He does not want her to have a desire of her own. He wants her always to be in the house, waiting for him when he comes home. He does not often gang up with his father against her: his whole inclination is to gang up with her against his father. But in this case he belongs with the men.
Mr Gouws
Something has been arranged on the telephone, he does not know what, but it makes him uneasy. He does not like the pleased, secretive smile his mother wears, the smile that means she has been meddling in his affairs.
These are the last days before they leave Worcester. They are also the best days of the school year, with examinations over and nothing to do but help the teacher fill in his mark book.
Mr Gouws reads out lists of marks; the boys add them up, subject by subject, then work out the percentages, racing to be the first with his hand up. The game lies in guessing which marks belong to whom. Usually he can recognise his own marks as a sequence rising to nineties and hundreds for arithmetic and tailing off with seventies for history and geography.
He does not do well at history or geography because he hates memorising. So much does he hate it that he postpones learning for history and geography examinations until the last minute, until the night before the examination or even the morning of the examination. He hates the very sight of the history textbook, with its stiff chocolate- brown covers and its long, boring lists of the causes of things (the causes of the Napoleonic Wars, the causes of the Great Trek). Its authors are Taljaard and Schoeman. He imagines Taljaard as thin and dry, Schoeman as plump and balding and bespectacled; Taljaard and Schoeman sit across a table from each other in a room in Paarl, writing bad-tempered pages and passing them across to each other. He cannot imagine why they should have wanted to write their book in English except to teach the Engelse children a lesson.
Geography is no better lists of towns, lists of rivers, lists of products. When he is asked to name the products of a country he always ends his list with hides and skins and hopes he is right. He does not know the difference between a hide and a skin, nor does anyone else.
As for the rest of the examinations, he does not look forward to them, yet, when the time comes, plunges into them willingly. He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped.
Sometimes, striking two rocks against each other and inhaling, he can reinvoke this state, this smell, this taste: gunpowder, iron, heat, a steady thudding in the veins.
The secret behind the telephone call, and behind his mothers smile, is revealed at the mid-morning break, when Mr Gouws motions him to stay behind. There is a false air about Mr Gouws, a friendliness he mistrusts.
Mr Gouws wants him to come to tea at his home. Dumbly he nods and memorises the address.
This is not something he wants. Not that he dislikes Mr Gouws. If he does not trust him as much as he trusted Mrs Sanderson in Standard Four, that is only because Mr Gouws is a man, the first male teacher he has had, and he is wary of something that breathes from all men: a restlessness, a roughness barely curbed, a hint of pleasure in cruelty. He does not know how to behave toward Mr Gouws or toward men: whether to offer them no resistance and court their approval, or to maintain a barrier of stiffness. Women are easier because they are kinder. But Mr Gouws he cannot deny it is as fair as a person can be. His command of English is good, and he seems to bear no grudge against the English or against boys from Afrikaans families who prefer to be English. During one of his many absences from school, Mr Gouws taught the parsing of complements-of-the- predicate. He has trouble catching up with the class on complements-of-the-predicate. If complements-of-the-predicate made no sense, like idioms, then the other boys would also be having trouble with them. But the other boys, or most of them, seem to have a perfectly easy command of complements-of-the-predicate. The conclusion cannot be escaped: Mr Gouws knows something about English grammar that he does not.
Mr Gouws uses the cane as much as any other teacher. But his favourite punishment, when the class has been too noisy for too long, is to order them to put down their pens, shut their books, clasp their hands behind their heads, close their eyes, and sit absolutely still.
Save for Mr Gouwss footfalls as he patrols up and down the rows, there is absolute silence in the room. From the eucalyptus trees around the quadrangle comes the tranquil cooing of doves. This is a punishment he could endure forever, with equanimity: the doves, the soft breathing of the boys around him.
Disa Road, where Mr Gouws lives, is also in Reunion Park, in the new, northern extension of the township which he has never explored. Not only does Mr Gouws live in Reunion Park and cycle to school on a bicycle with fat tyres: he has a wife, a plain, dark woman, and, even more surprising, two small children. This he discovers in the living- room of 11 Disa Road, where there are scones and a pot of tea waiting on the table, and where, as he had feared, he is left alone with Mr Gouws, having to make desperate, false conversation.
It gets even worse. Mr Gouws who has put aside his tie and jacket for shorts and khaki socks is trying to pretend to him that, now that the school year is over, now that he is about to leave Worcester, the two of them can be friends. In fact he is trying to suggest that they have been friends all year: the teacher and the cleverest boy, the class leader.
He grows flustered and stiff. Mr Gouws offers him a second scone, which he refuses. Go on! says Mr Gouws, and smiles, and puts it on his plate anyway. He longs to be gone.
He had wanted to leave Worcester with everything in order. He had been prepared to give Mr Gouws a place in his memory beside Mrs Sanderson: not quite with her, but close to her. Now Mr Gouws is spoiling it. He wishes he wouldnt.
The second scone sits on the plate uneaten. He will pretend no more: he grows mute and stubborn. Must you go? says Mr Gouws. He nods. Mr Gouws rises and accompanies him to the front gate, which is a copy of the gate at 12 Poplar Avenue, the hinges whining on exactly the same high note.
At least Mr Gouws has the sense not to make him shake hands or do something else stupid.
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life will be published in South Africa by Secker & Warburg on October 15
BLURB: The memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping toward her own desire. He does not want her to go