Towards the end of this novel the protagonist, Simon, innocently observes that he was the only boy who could spell “obsequious”. And at the outset he refers to the other main character, Fanie de Bergh, as “one of the poor children”.
As the only child of the magistrate in the Orange Free State dorp of Verkeerdespruit, Simon is socially far better placed than Fanie, also an only child, but whose parents are so poor that they qualify for charity handouts from the OVV, the Oranje Vrouevereeniging. The distance between these two boys, and their closeness, is subtly explored, with Simon always trying to increase the distance and Fanie just being there.
In this his first novel, Michiel Heyns recreates for us with unpretentious clarity the almost forgotten mindset of white South Africa in the 1960s. The novel moves between the imaginary Verkeerdespruit and Bloemfontein, as Heyns examines the linguistic underpinnings of attitudes that existed then all over the country. The title, The Children’s Day, comes from Robert Graves’s poem The Cool Web, in which he says language is used by adults to keep reality at bay, to distance and protect themselves from the immediacy, vulnerability, terror and joy that children experience, exposed as they are to “the wide glare of the children’s day”.
The young Simon, at primary school in the dorp with the rest of the heterogeneous mob and Fanie (all the white children) attempts to understand the world around him by understanding language. What for example does it mean when Steve, the “ducktail” who comes to the dorp on a motorbike, is hounded out by the OVV on the grounds that he “interfered with” young boys? And Betty the Exchange has to guard against getting “a reputation”.
Simon narrates all the happenings of the dorp, in some cases also mediated for him by Betty the Exchange, with whom he spends Saturday afternoons in the local café, drinking milkshakes and reading Personality and Rooi Rose magazines. Her goal in life is to save enough money to have plastic surgery to remedy her lack of a chin, but the ill-fated Steve disrupts this plan.
Simon is sent to school in Bloemfontein where he meets people who read, know and love classical music, and has the blessing of a wise headmaster not prepared to ruin the lives of boys reported to him for “punishing Percy”. It is from this relatively expansive and cultured environment that Simon narrates the story.
Fanie, now at Odendaalsrus Technical High, arrives as part of a visiting tennis team and in his unaffected and humble way, which Simon sees now as “the gormless maladroitness of backwater living”, succeeds in inflaming all the unanswered questions and unresolved issues that lie in Simon’s memories of Verkeerdespruit.
Describing a final confrontation in which Simon hopes to shake Fanie off for ever, he says, “His clumsy figure, with its uncoordinated assortment of arms, legs and genitalia, embodied all the ineptitude of his youth and mine, its ignorance in the grip of processes and experiences it had not learned to understand or control. And yet he had a strange self-possession, too, that I found even more irksome than his abject deference.”
It is Fanie, not protected by language, Fanie who can barely put a sentence together, who nevertheless knows what it is that Simon needs to know.
This is one of those novels that has an entirely original feel, spun as it is from the unlikely, unpromising material of very ordinary white South Africans at a time when the national consciousness was being hemmed in on all sides.