The Lying Days

Chapter 1

One Saturday in late August when my friend Olwen Taylor’s mother telephoned to say that Olwen would not be able to go to the bioscope because she was going to a wedding, I refused to go with Gloria Dufalette (I heard Mrs. Dufalette’s call, out the back door in the next house — Gloriah, Gloriah!) or with Paddy Connolly. — Paddy Connolly’s little brother picked his nose, and no member of his family stopped him doing it.—

“What’ll she do, then?” asked my father.

My mother was pinning her hair ready for her tennis cap, looking straight back at herself in the mirror. Up-down, went her shoulders. “I don’t know. She’s not pleased with anything I suggest.”

But her indifference was not real. She followed me out into the garden where I stood in the warm still winter afternoon. “Now what are you going to do? Do you want to come with Mommy and Daddy and bring your book?” New powder showed white where the sun shone full on her nose and chin; it seemed to emphasize the fact that she was ready and waiting and yet held back. In a sense of power, I did not answer; my mother’s face waited, as if I had spoken and she had not quite heard. “Eh? What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” I said, richly sullen. I saw the bedroom windows jerked in by an unseen hand; my father was ready, too. They were both waiting, their afternoon dependent upon me.

“Where are you going?”

Somewhere away from the houses resting back round the square of the Recreation Hall, beyond the pines in the road and the gums sounding, over the dry veld and in the town, Olwen was putting on a blue crinoline hat. Who could believe it was happening the same time as the doves spread their fat breasts in comfortable dust baths in the garden? Everything was wailing for me to answer. “Helen! You must make up your mind what you want to do. You know I can’t leave you on your own, the girl’s out.” Yes, I knew that, an unwritten law so sternly upheld and generally accepted that it would occur to no child to ask why: a little girl must not be left alone because there were native boys about. That was all. Native boys were harmless and familiar because they were servants, or delivery boys bringing the groceries or the fish by bicycle from town, or Mine boys something to laugh at in their blankets and their clay-spiked hair, but at the same time they spoke and shouted in a language you didn’t understand and dressed differently in any old thing, and so were mysterious. Not being left alone because they were about was simply something to do with their mysteriousness.

I squatted, digging the point of my hairslide into the white flakes of dead grass. “Helen?” My mother was not angry yet, still impatient; every moment I went on digging at the grass was riskier and nearer to anger. “Not going anywhere,” I mumbled, as if not caring if my mother heard or not. She turned with a skid of her tennis shoe on the gravel and walked into the house. At once she came back again, the key in her hand, my father behind her. It was always strange to see his knees, thin and surprised at their exposure, in shorts; they flickered a suggestion — half recognized, then gone out again — that he had mysteriousness somewhere, was someone else, to be seen by other people the way I could see other people. He had little authority with me; believed that, whenever something went wrong, my mother did not quite know how to deal with me, but refrained from interfering much himself. He would look at the two of us with the head-shaking tolerance of a man listening to the quarrels of two women. “What’s the trouble?” he said now, though he had been told. It was as if he trusted the tale of one no more than that of the other.

Burning with a new and strange pleasure, I did not answer. I could feel them standing tall, over me. “No, we’re just going to leave her here, that’s all,” said my mother briskly and coldly. Her chin was tightened in offense. “The back door’s open and she can just be left to her own devices. If something happens to her it’s her own fault. I’m not ruining my afternoon for her.”

She had gone too far, and spoiled the effect. We all knew that her afternoon was ruined; that she was terrified and convinced that “something” would happen to me; that her stride to the gate was a piece of bravado that cost her more than it was worth. Yet she sat in the car waiting, looking straight before her. “Will you be all right, Nell—? You’ll play quietly in the garden, eh?” said my father softly, touching my head as he followed. At the gate he turned back, as if he were about to make a sudden suggestion. But he closed the gate behind him and got into the car.

I heard it shake into life at the push of the starter button, pant obediently until it was put into gear, swish past the tough grasses at the curb and then swell away up the road. When it had gone, I looked up. Sun stroked the pine trees; there was a faint smell of petrol from the empty road where the car had been. I began to walk round and round the lawn balancing on the bricks which outlined it, whispering over and over — Not going anywhere, not going anywhere. I went and climbed on the gate, hanging out over to the road. Far off, along the houses, someone was hammering. Bellingan’s old black dog was zigzagging with busy aimlessness in the grounds of the Recreation Hall. He went in, in the shadow, came out in the light, like a fish rising and disappearing in water. A car passed; a reminder.

I came slowly back up the path and to the front door, forgetting it was locked. I tried it a few times and then went slowly round the back — Anna’s little room with its padlocked door and shut window protected with homemade tin burglar bars, tight in the quiet — and into the house. In my bedroom I stood before the mirror that was the middle door of the wardrobe, looking at myself. After a long time, steady and unblinking, only the sound of my breath, the face was just a face like other people’s faces met in the street. It looked at me a little longer. Suddenly I slammed the door, ran out of the passage which seemed to take up and give out the sound of each of my footsteps as if it were counting them, and through the kitchen which was noting each drip of the tap and the movement of a fly on a potato peeling. I went straight down the garden path and out of the gate into the road.

The sun pressed gently warm down on my shoulders as I walked in the road. Drifts of brown pine needles glistened in a wavering wash; sloping toward the sides, they were bedded down firmly, inches deep, beneath my feet. I stepped on an old orange peel, sucked out and dried so long that it crushed like the shell of a beetle. Tiny gray winter birds bounced on the telephone wires, flicked away. From the long gardens of the staff houses, doves sounded continuously like the even breathing of a sleeper.

Mr. Bellingan sat on a chair on his lawn with his shoes off and his feet up. His head was dropped to one side behind his paper. Next door two little boys hunched up over something they were making, backs to the gate. I left the row behind me.

Along the rippling white corrugated tin fences of the backs of another row, where the tin garages opened out onto a grassy road, some of the Married Quarters people were cleaning their cars. A man and a woman rubbed away in silence; inside the car, a small child was playing, licking the back window, then smearing it with a dirty pink feeder which was tied round its neck. The baby called out something to me that I didn’t hear. Farther up, a garage leaned heavily upon by an old bare willow was open and spilled out onto the rough track tools, oilcans and the red, tender-looking intestines of a tire. The two Cluff boys with faces fierce with smears, pale khaki shorts hanging distractedly from their hips and their mother’s thick knitted socks sunk into fat rims round their pale legs, were helping someone dismantle a motorcycle. They gave each other technical instructions in terse gasps, as they struggled with the prostrate machine whose handle bars stuck up obstinately in the air.

There was a smell of burning, and the faint intoxication of rotting oranges from the dustbins. I walked closer to the level line offences, trailing the fingers of my left hand lightly across the corrugations so that they rose and fell in an arpeggio of movement. I thought of water. Of the sea — oh, the surprise, the lift of remembering that there was the sea, that it was there now, somewhere, belonging to last year’s and next year’s two weeks of holiday at Durban — the sea which did something the same to your fingers, threading water through them … like the pages of a thick book falling away rapidly ripply back beneath your fingers to solidity. — The sea could not be believed in for long, here. Could be smelled for a moment, a terrible whiff of longing evaporated with the deeper snatch of breath that tried to seize it. Or remembered by the blood, which now and then felt itself stirred by a movement caused by something quite different, setting up reactions purely physically like those in response to the sea.

“Helen? Where you go-ing—?” A child with her hair in curlers hung over the fence, standing on an old packing case. A tiny kitten whose eyes were not yet open nosed the air mewing from her tight hand.

“Somewhere,” I said, not looking back.

“Aren’t you going to bioscope?”

I had passed. The back of my head shook slow vehement denial. “Where you go-ing?” the child shouted. “Somewhere!” I shouted, down the end of the road, now. In the gum plantation that bordered the Mine property I came to a stop beneath one of the firm trunks and stood patiently peeling off the curling bark. It was tough, fibrous and dry to my tugging, and it came away with a crackle and a tear, leaving a smooth gray surface soothing beneath my palm. The trunk was hard and cool, like the pillars at the library. I sat down on a stone that had a secret cold of its own and began to pull off the scab on my knee. I had been saving that scab for days, resisting the compelling urge just to put the edge of my nail beneath it, just to test it. … Now it was a tough little seal of dried blood, holding, but not deeply attached to the new skin hidden beneath it. I did it very slowly, lifting it all round with my thumbnail and then pinching the skin between my forefinger and thumb so that the edge of the scab showed up free of the skin, a sharp ridge. There was the feeling of it, ready to slough off, unnecessary on my knee; almost an itch. Then I lifted it off quick and clean and there was no tweak of some spot not quite healed, but only the pleasure of the break with the thin tissue that had held it on. Holding the scab carefully, I looked at the healed place. The new pink shiny pale skin seemed stuck like a satiny petal on the old; I felt it tenderly. Then I looked at the scab, held on the ball of my thumb, felt its tough papery uselessness, and the final deadness that had come upon it the moment it was no longer on my leg. Putting it between my front teeth, I bit it in half and looked at the two pieces. Then I took them on the end of my tongue and bit them again and again until they disappeared in my mouth.

The Mine houses had their fences and hedges around them, their spoor of last summer’s creepers drawn up about their walls. I went down the dust road through the trees and out onto the main road that shook everything off from it, that stood up alone and straight in the open sun and the veld.

It was different, being down on the road instead of up in the bus or the car, seeing it underneath. A firm tar road, blue colored and good to walk on, like hard rubber. I trotted along, pressing my heels into it. Now and then a car hooted behind me and I stepped onto the stony side where dry khaki weed fastened its seed like a row of pins to the hem of my dress. I liked the feeling of the space, empty about me, the unfamiliarity of being alone. Two Mine boys were coming toward me; passed me, the one wearing his tin underground helmet and khaki trousers drawn in with string around his bare ankles, the other in a raggy loincloth beneath a gray blanket patterned with yellow and cyclamen whorls. They were smoking pipes; one had a little homemade pouch, of some animal skin, in his hand. I looked straight ahead, sternly. When I had gone on a bit, I looked back. But they were a long way off, not caring, laughing as if they were separated from each other by a stretch of veld and wanted to make themselves heard. A delivery boy from the town zigzagged past on his bicycle: a smart boy whistling in black-and-white shoes, brown trousers and a bow tie. A curious feeling prickled round my shoulders. Was there something to be afraid of?

The red dust path turning off to the stores was somewhere I had never been. There were children on the Mine, little children in pushcarts whose mothers let the nursegirls take them anywhere they liked; go down to the filthy kaffir stores to gossip with the boys and let those poor little babies they’re supposed to be taking care of breathe in heaven knows what dirt and disease, my mother often condemned. Other children called them the Jew stores, and sometimes bicycled down there to get some stuff to fix bicycle punctures. I slowed. But to turn round and go back to the Mine would be to have been nowhere. Lingering in the puffy dust, I made slowly for the stores huddled wall to wall in a line on the veld up ahead.

There were dozens of natives along the path. Some lay on the burned grass, rolled in their blankets, face down, as if they were dead in the sun. Others squatted and stood about shouting, passed on to pause every few yards and shout back something else. Quite often the exchange lasted for half a mile, bellowed across the veld until one was too far away to do more than wave a stick eloquently at the other. A boy in an old dishcloth walked alone, thrumming a big wooden guitar painted with gilt roses. Orange peels and pith were thrown about, and a persistent fly kept settling on my lip. But I went on rather faster and determined, waving my hand impatiently before my face and watching a white man who stood outside one of the stores with his hands on his hips while a shopboy prized open a big packing case. The Mine boys sauntering and pushing up and down the pavement jostled the man, got in the way. He kept jerking his head back in dismissal, shouting something at them.

He was a short ugly man with a rough gray chin; as I stepped onto the broken cement pavement he looked up at me with screwed-up eyes, irritably, and did not see me. His shirt was open at the neck and black hairs were scribbled on the little patch of dead white skin. “Cam-an!” He grabbed the chisel from the shopboy and creaked it under the wooden lid. The shopboy in his European clothes stood back bored among the Mine boys. I went past feeling very close to the dirty battered pavement, almost as if I were crawling along it like an insect under the noise and the press of natives. The air had a thick smell of sweat and strange pigment and herbs, and as I came to the door of the eating house, a crescendo of heavy, sweet nauseating blood-smell, the clamor of entrails stewing richly, assailed me like a sudden startling noise. I drew in a breath of shock and saw in the dark interior wooden benches and trestles and dark faces and flies; the flash of a tin mug, and a big white man in a striped butcher’s apron cutting a chunk of bruised and yellow fat-streaked meat from a huge weight impaled on a hook. Sawdust on the floor showed pocked like sand and spilled out onto the pavement, shaking into the cracks and fissures, mixing with the dust and torn paper, clogged here and there with blood.

Fowls with the quick necks of scavengers darted about between my trembling legs; the smeary windows of the shops were deep and mysterious with jumble that, as I stopped to look, resolved into shirts and shoes and braces and beads, yellow pomade in bottles, mirrors and mauve socks and watch chains, complicated as a mosaic, undisturbed, and always added to — a football jersey here, an enamel tiepin there, until there was not one corner, one single inch of the window which was not rich and complicatedly hung. Written on bits of cardboard, notices said CHEAP, THE LATEST. In the corners drifts of dead flies peaked up. Many others lay, wire legs up, on smooth shirt fronts. From the doorways where blankets somber and splendid with fierce colors hung, gramophones swung out the blare and sudden thrilling cry — the voice of a woman high and minor above the concerted throats of a choir of men — of Bantu music, and the nasal wail of American cowboy songs. Tinseled tin trunks in pink and green glittered in the gloom.

There were people there, shadowy, strange to me as the black men with the soft red inside their mouths showing as they opened in the concentration of spending money. There was even a woman, in a flowered alpaca apron, coming out to throw something into the pavement crowd. There was another woman, sitting on an upturned soapbox pulling at a hangnail on her short, broad thumb. She yawned — her fat ankles, in cotton stockings, settled over her shoes — and looked up puffily. Yes? Yes? she chivied a native who was pointing at something in the window at her side, and grunting. “—Here,” she called back into the dark shop, not moving. “He wants a yellow shirt. Here in the winder, with stripes.”

I passed her with a deep frown; it was on my face all the time now. My heart ran fast and trembly, like the heart of a kitten I had once held. I held my buttocks stiffly together as I went along, looking, looking. But I felt my eyes were not quick enough, and darted here and there at once, fluttering over everything, unable to see anything singly and long enough. And at the same time I wanted to giggle, to stuff my hand in my mouth so that a squeal, like a long squeeze of excitement, should not wring through me.

Even when I was smaller, fairy tales had never interested me much. To me, brought up into the life of a South African mine, stories of children living the ordinary domestic adventures of the upper-middle-class English family — which was the only one that existed for children’s books published in England in the thirties — were weird and exotic enough. Nannies in uniform, governesses and ponies, nurseries and playrooms and snow fights — all these commonplaces of European childhood were as unknown and therefore as immediately enviable as the life of princesses in legendary castles to the English children for whom the books were written. I had never read a book in which I myself was recognizable; in which there was a “girl” like Anna who did the housework and the cooking and called the mother and father Missus and Baas; in which the children ate and lived closely with their parents and played in the lounge and went to the bioscope. So it did not need the bounds of credulity to be stretched to princes who changed into frogs or houses that could be eaten like gingerbread to transport me to an unattainable world of the imagination. The sedate walk of two genteel infant Tories through an English park was other world enough for me.

Yet now as I stood in this unfamiliar part of my own world knowing and flatly accepting it as the real world because it was ugly and did not exist in books (if this was the beginning of disillusion, it was also the beginning of Colonialism: the identification of the unattainable distant with the beautiful, the substitution of “overseas” for “fairyland”) I felt for the first time something of the tingling fascination of the gingerbread house before Hansel and Gretel, anonymous, nobody’s children, in the woods. Standing before the one small window of the native medicine shop I no longer could be bored before the idea of the beckoning witch and the collection of pumpkins and lamps and mice that shot up into carriages and genii and coachmen or two-headed dogs. Not that these dusty lions’ tails, these piles of wizened seeds, these flaking gray roots and strange teeth could be believed to hold tight, like Japanese paper flowers, magic that might suddenly open. Not that the peeled skin of a snake, curling like an apple skin down the window, could suggest a dragon. But the dustiness, the grayness, the scavenged collection of tooth and claw and skin and sluggish potion brought who knows by whom or how far or from where, waiting beneath cobwebs and neglect … the shudder of revulsion at finding my finger going out wanting to touch it! It winked suddenly like the eye of a crocodile that waited looking like a harmless dry log: you did not know what you might be looking at, what awfulness inert in withered heaps behind the glass.

It was at this moment that a small boy came skipping down the pavement white and unconcerned with a tin pistol dangling against his navy blue pants, and a bicycle bell tringing importantly in his hand. He walked straight past me with the ease of someone finding his way about his own house, and dodged through the Mine boys as if they were the fowls, making up their minds for them when they did not seem to know whether they wanted to step this way or that. He was dark, but his eyes were big and light beneath childishly rumpled eyebrows: he was gone, into a doorway farther up.

I could not have said why the sight of another child was so startling. He seemed to flash through my mind, tearing mystery, strangeness, as a thick cobweb splits to nothing brushed away by the hand of a man. I was interested now in the native customers inside the medicine shop who were buying roots and charms the way people buy aspirins. I watched one boy who took his money from a yellow tobacco bag and then had a measure of greenish flakes poured into a second tobacco bag. Another was turning a tiny empty tortoise shell over in his hand; I wondered how much such a thing would cost, then remembered that I had no money. It was a charming little mound of brown and amber medallions, so neatly fitted. … Perhaps I could come back and get one someday. I felt a longing of affection for the tortoise shell which was to me a creature in itself; I would carry it everywhere with me, look at the light through its stripy shell the way the light looked through a leaf or the stained-glass window that the Millars had put up to the memory of their son, in the church.

The boy did not buy the shell. It went back onto the wooden shelf. I pressed nearer the window and made a spy hole with my hand against the rheumy glass to see in better, and as I did so my eye was caught by another eye. Something was alive in the window: a chameleon, crouched motionless and matching on a bundle of gray-green sticks until then, was making its way slowly up the rib of wood that seamed the corner of the window. Its little soft divided feet, each one like two little slender hands joined and facing outward from the wrist, fluttered for a hold and swayed, feeling the air. One eye in the wrinkled socket looked ahead, the other swiveled back fixed on me. Ah-h! I cried, scratching my finger at the glass and leaning my whole weight against it. I followed the creature all up the window and down again, when it walked across the floor high-stepping over the piles of herbs and objects. Then it stopped, swayed, and a long thin tongue like one of those rude streamers you blow out in people’s faces at Christmas shot unrolled and curled back again with a fly coiled within it. The thin mouth was closed, a rim of pale green. Both eyes turned backward looking at me.

I turned away from the medicine shop and went on along the pavement, past a shoemaker’s, two more outfitter’s and a bicycle shop which had a bicycle cut out of tin and painted red and yellow hanging in the doorway, and sold sewing machines and portable gramophones. Inside the shop the small boy leaned with his stomach against a battered counter. The bottom of his face was heavy with concentration and he had an oilcan and a length of chain in his hands. A baby of about three scuffed the dust on the cement at his feet and said over and over, liking the sound of the words and not expecting an answer, “Let me! Letme, letme, letme.” There were only two more stores. Then the bare rubbed dust that had been veld but had worn away beneath ill-fitting mine boots and tough naked toes (the skin of the natives’ feet was like bark, the nails like thorn). There native vendors squatted beside braziers offering roasted mealies and oranges arranged in pyramids. They sat comfortably, waiting for custom to come to them; they looked levelly out at the Mine boys looking around with money to spend, parcels from the stores under their arms, sometimes a loaf of bread white under the black hot armpit. The gramophones from the stores made music and there was gossip and shouting above the tiny hammering of a man who sat crosslegged beating copper wire into bracelets — they caught the sharp winter sun like the telephone wires. Fowls hung about the mealie braziers, and just where the stores’ pavement crumbled off into the dust, a boy sat with a sewing machine, whirring the handle with his vigorous elbow jutting. Beside him were khaki and white drill trousers, neatly patched over the knees with crisscross strengthening in red and blue. He himself wore a curious loose garment, like a nightshirt.

Even though it was winter there were flies here (one settled lovingly on me again, this time bumbling my ear) and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine. It had eaten the grass of the veld away, it had soured the earth with a crude animal foulness. I could not place it (a faint whiff, overlaid with disinfectant, came out of the public cloakroom near the bus terminus where my mother would not let me go); but my lip twitched up in distaste. The shouting seemed part of the smell and the twirl of flies; I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me — some horrible dirt, something alive, perhaps. — A child had once crammed a locust down my back at school, and for days afterward I had sudden attacks of shuddering all over the surface of my body so that I had wanted to tear off my clothes and examine every inch of my skin.

I looked at these dark brown faces — the town natives were somehow lighter — dark as teak and dark as mahogany, shining with the warm grease of their own liveness lighting up their skin; wondering, receptive, unthinking, taking in with their eyes as earth takes water; close-eyed, sullen with the defensive sullenness of the defenseless; noisy and merry with the glee of the innocent. And to me, in my kilts and my hand-knitted socks and my hair tied with neat ribbon, they were something to look at with a half-smile, as I had watched the chameleon in the window.

I crunched to the path and the road over burned veld that dissolved crisply in puffs of black dust round my shoes and I passed a Mine boy standing with his back to me and his legs apart. I had vaguely noticed them standing that curious way before, as I whisked past in the car. But as I passed this one — he was singing, and the five or six yards he had put between himself and the vendors was simply a gesture — I saw a little stream of water curving from him. Not shock but a sudden press of knowledge, hot and unwanted, came upon me. A question that had waited inside me but had never risen into words or thoughts because there were no words for it — no words with myself, my mother, with Olwen even. I began to run, very fast, along the tar, the smooth straight road. And presently the run slackened and calmed, and I skipped along, jerking my hair over my ears, one foot catching behind the other.

I did not go back to the house but across the Recreation Hall grounds under the trees and round to the tennis courts where, before I could see the wires sparkling filaments of silver, I heard beyond the pines and the clipped hedge and the deep cooing of doves the pomp! pomp! of the balls.

Round the dark hedge in the clear sun I saw them suddenly as a picture, the white figures with turning pink faces running on the courts, the striped blazers lying on the pale grass, the bare pink legs and white sand shoes sitting in the log house. They were having tea. The young men sat on the grass. Alec Finlay panted, one leg stretched, resting on his elbows. He saw me and waved. Then my mother looked up over a big enamel urn, a little puzzled, as if she had heard a familiar sound. I smiled at her. “Well, young lady?” said Alec, screwing up his eyes and his smile. I walked into the shade, the smell of hot tea, lavender water, and fresh white clothes. “Are you going to join us, Helen?” a pretty grown-up girl asked me. “New blood for the second league!” said someone, and they all laughed, because they had just lost their match. “Just in time for tea, I’d say.” My mother was in the grown-up conspiracy of banter, nodding her head mockingly as she smiled. They all laughed again. My mother’s hand felt over my damp forehead, lifting the hair back. “D’you want some tea, darling?” Her head was on one side, smiling down into my face, the little springs of red hair escaping. She was pleased to be able to ignore the argument, the vague anxiousness that had ended up satisfactorily in a loneliness that had sent me tailing after her, after all.

I sat beside her, thirstily gulping tea, feet not quite reaching the ground. “No, no, you don’t,” said a fat fair man, waving back the crumpets. “Do you want to weigh me down and give yourself an advantage?”—They laughed helplessly again; he was the comedian of the crowd, he was always coming out with something. In fact, he had such a reputation for being amusing that they laughed, found their mouths twitching in reflex every time he opened his, no matter what he said. I laughed with them. Soon I was handing round the crumpets, helping with fresh cups of tea. They teased me and talked to me playfully; I blushed when the young men chaffed me in a way that seemed to deepen some secret between them and their girls. But recklessly, I could answer them back, teasing too, I could make them laugh. They said: “Listen to her! — Did you hear that—?” I stood bridling with pleasure, looking wide out of my eyes in the face of applause.

I went there often on Saturday afternoons after that, accepted as one of them, but with the distinction of being the only child in the party. It was easy to be one of them because I soon knew their jokes as well as they did themselves and, beside my mother, sat a little forward as they did, waiting for each to come out with his famous remark. Then when they rocked and shook their heads at getting just what they had expected, I would jump up and down, clutching at my mother’s arm in delight.

I was quite one of them.

Chapter 2

The road on which I had hesitated before going down to the Concession Stores that Saturday afternoon was the road between Mine and town. I passed along it going to school every morning. I came back along it at two o’clock every afternoon in the bus which had shaken past first the Town Hall in its geometrical setting of flower beds and frostbitten lawn and municipal coat-of-arms grown in tight fleshy cactus; the dirty shopblinds of the main street making a chalky dazzle; the native delivery boys sitting in the gutters, staring at their broken shoes; the buildings, like a familiar tune picked out silently on a keyboard: one, one, two-story, two, one, one-story — then the houses of the township, long rows of corrugated iron roofs behind bullet-headed municipal trees shorn regularly to keep them free of the telephone wires, the Greek shop with its pyramid of crude pink coconut buns and frieze of spotted bananas, the doctor’s house with a tiled roof and a tennis court; and out at last, past the last row of houses turning their back yards — a patchwork of washing, a broken dog kennel, the little one-eyed room where the servant lived — to the veld.

Seen from the bus, this stretch of road between town and Mine was featureless with familiarity. A few natives sauntered along, trailing their blankets in the red dust; very occasionally was there a diversion — one day, the figure of a small boy on a bicycle, holding a big live red hen under each arm, and scudding along over the dips and mounds of the dust-deep path from the Concession Stores like a surf rider. And even he had interested no one but me, though as he passed and the yellow scaly legs of the fowls showed sticking out mutely under his elbows, I rose and pressed my forehead against the window, making my gaze felt on the whorl of dark hair on the crown of his head. … Mostly there was no focus of attention between the last of the town of Atherton and the point where the bus approached the line of a signboard that widened to spell out ATHERTON PTY. MINES LTD., and the trees separated into gray trunks reaching up in swaths of bark like muscle, and shifting shapes of spilling leaves that, leaves on leaves, moving always, as the sea moves, thinning and thickening as cloud changes, showed and then closed over a flickering of white-painted tin fence, the dim red roofs orderly as tents.

Daily, when the bus put me down here, I was home. Past the first three rows of houses and up alongside the fourth. All built of the same dark brick with low roofs, small windows and porches enclosed with a fine-meshed wire screening which had a tinny dazzle like the sheen off a piece of moire when it was new, but now was tarnished, and darkened each entrance with homely gloom. Even in the middle of the day, little glowing points of orange light showed behind the windows: inside Mine houses it was always dark. The houses of the officials in the fourth row were bigger than the others, set well back from the road with a tall row of pines screening their long narrow gardens. They looked out across the road upon an untidy square park, deeply bordered with great solemn pines which had cast their needles and dark shade so long that beneath them the grass had worn away and died, and the earth was theirs, cut off by them from the sun. Small children fluttered about their nursemaids like butterflies, and in the middle stood the Recreation Hall. Like everything else it had been built by the Mine and it belonged to the Mine; cut-out steel letters spelled ATHERTON RECREATION HALL across the chipped portico, and posters advertising dances and bridge drives long past hung peeling from the pillars.

There our house was; and I lived in it as I lived in my body. I was not aware of the shape of it, of its existence as a building the way the school existed or the houses in the town; nor of its relation to the other houses of the Mine about it and again the town about them: I had begun within it, at the pin point of existence, and hollowed out within it my awareness. When I came home the authority of school — my uniform, the black stockings, the blazer which held the smell of ink and dust and classrooms curiously cold as if they had been steeped in water, of orange peel and curling egg sandwich in my lunch tin — became invalid. There there was no need of an exterior, a way to smile and talk and listen to other people, the little suit of consciousness a child climbs into the very first time he is led in to be shown to someone from outside; there I did not have to put on that to show I was alive, for there was the path, pressing gravel up to my soles, there was the leafless frond of the jasmine bush, touching my ear like my own hair, there was the drift of brown pine needles held in the guttering of the veranda as in the palm of my hand.

Every afternoon, our native girl Anna, eating her lunch: tearing off chunks of bread and washing them down with great gulps of tea from an old jam tin. The voice of my mother, high, questioning, accompanied by an arpeggio of spoons gently striking delicate china; coming out of the house like the voice of the walls: “Helen?” Under the light in the dark little sitting room, the willow pattern tea-things out. Embroidered cloth and tea cozy in the shape of a china doll in a wool crocheted crinoline, crumpets polished with yellow butter, the whole covered with a square of green net weighted with beads. My mother’s footsteps in high heels quick and loud down the pasage. A little burst of voices: Come in! Hu-llo … so I thought we’d just … yes, I’m glad you did … no, not at all, just right, of course not — and my mother’s voice and my mother’s sharp heels leading up the passage, past the half-open door behind which I would flatten myself, while the little troop filled my mother’s bedroom with movement and gasps and laughter, like the commotion of swimmers rubbing themselves down after cold water.

Past the Eau-de-Cologne presence of my mother, into the room, putting each patent shoe down from toe to heel, smiling, but my lips tucked together as if something might escape. A place made for me at the table, holding their handbags to their laps as they shifted: Here, see what it is I’ve got for you! Hullo! Was that the tartan my mother had been making up for me one day at the Compound Manager’s? — They would smile down at me, as if I were a surprise. And then when my father came home and walked into the bright close sitting room slapping his folded paper in his palm, they stirred and gave little cries, like busily feeding birds startled by a stone.

“So late already!”

“Look, it’s almost dark.”

The afternoon was their own domain, but the evening belonged to the menfolk. None of them had anything to say to my father; the warm flow of their talk always dried up the instant he walked in. They wanted to pack themselves and the evidence of their close and personal preoccupations — the ridiculous dangle of baby booties, the embroidered crash bags holding tangled silks — out of his way. “A man wants his home to himself,” Mrs. Cluff often said.

And then, before dinner, my mother’s feet different in her everyday shoes again; lying on the rug, I watched them and the long hard black legs of Anna (without the shine her brown face had — blacker with the cold of the yard, roughened with early mornings and biting nights) bare into shoes hollowed out by someone else’s fat ankles, passing and repassing as the table was laid for dinner.…

It was this to which the road brought me back always; and it was from this that we set out, my mother and father and I, when we went into the town on Saturday mornings. Then we went by car, and my father parked in the main street outside the department store where dirty ragged little native boys said over and over, like small birds repeating one note, Look after your car, sah? Look after your car, sah? My father would lock the doors and try the handles and threaten: “No! Now get away. Get away from this car.” Once one boy had pushed another and said, “Don’t take him, sir, that boy’s no good,” and I had laughed but my father had tightened his nostrils and walked through the native children saying Hamba! Hamba! “Something should be done about it,” he often said, “little loafers and thieves, they should chase them off the streets.”

Wherever we went to shop in the town we were known, and when my mother bought anything she would simply say, “G. P. Shaw, Atherton”—and that would be enough. The charge slip would go shooting away up the wire in its little brass cage to the office perched above. If by any chance — there might be a new shop assistant — we were asked to give an address, my mother would raise her eyebrows and say in a high, amused voice, lifting the corner of her mouth a little, “Mrs. G. P. Shaw, 138 Staff Officials’ Quarters, Atherton Proprietary Mines Limited — but really, Atherton’s all that anyone ever wants.”

The little town with its one busy street was alive with the mines on a Saturday. The Mine people came from Atherton, Atherton Deep, Platfontein, New Postma, Basilton Levels and the new mines opening up, but not yet in production, to the east of the town. In the three barbershops behind curtained doorways scissors chattered ceaselessly and the crossed feet of waiting men showed tilted up before newspapers in the outer shop. The bright windows held hundreds of small objects, from razor blades and pipe cleaners to watches and brooches, and the smell of sweet violet oil came warmly out to the pavement. I dragged slowly past, afraid to peep in (barbershops were mysterious as bars, and as unapproachable) but wondering if my father were there. I never found him; but later when we met him at the car his neck would be pink and there would be tiny short sharp fragments of hair dusted into the rim of his ear.

There were two big grocers in Atherton, but Mine people didn’t go to Golden Supply Stores but to Bond and Son. It took at least half an hour to give an order at Bond’s because there Mine women met not only their neighbors from their own property, and women from other properties, but also the surprise of women who had been transferred to some other mine on another part of the chain of gold mines called the Reef, and transferred back again just as unexpectedly. Then Mr. Bond, a short, thick-faced man with many opinions, had known my mother for many years. He liked to lean across the counter on one ham-shaped forearm and, with his eyes darting round the shop as if he didn’t want anyone else to guess at what he could possibly be saying, tell her how if it wasn’t his bread and butter, he could talk, all right. Cocktail cabinets and radiograms and running up big bills for the food they ate. “I could mention some names,” he’d say. “I know. I know.” My mother would smile, in a soft voice, pulling her mouth in. “Only if you’re in business you dare not talk. Smile and say nothing.” “Smile and say nothing,” the grocer took up as if it had been just what he was looking for, “that’s it all right. Smile and say nothing. But how people can live like that beats me. …” “How they can put their heads on the pillow at night. …” My mother shook her head. “But it just depends on how you were brought up, Mr. Bond. I couldn’t do it if you paid me. …”

If Mr. Bond was already serving, it would be Mr. Cronje, the tall thin Afrikaans assistant, who spoke a very careful and peculiar English and had a duodenal ulcer. Before she started to give her order my mother would ask how he was. He would take his pencil from behind his big sad ear and put it back again and say, “Ag, still alive, you know, Mrs. Shaw, still alive.” And then looking down the long flat expanse of his white apron he would tell her about the attack he had on Sunday night, or the new diet of kaffir beer or sour milk which his wife’s sister had recommended. And my mother would say, “You must take care of yourself, you must look after yourself.” He would sigh and his false teeth would move loosely in his wide mouth. “But you know how it is, if you not you own boss.…”

While my mother was absorbed at the counter in one way or another, I wandered off round the shop. Near the door there was a sloping glass showcase displaying varieties of biscuits and in the middle of the shop was a pillar with mirrors all round. The oilcloth round the base was stained and often splattered because all the dogs that were brought into the store strained at their leads to get to it. Occasionally a stray ranged in from the street, wavering bewilderedly round the shop and then sniffing up to the pillar; then one of the assistants would rush out flapping his apron and shout, “Voetsak!” and the startled creature would flatten itself out into the street. At Christmas and Easter there were big packing cases piled up open on the floor at the far end of the shop, filled with boxes of elaborate crackers, or fancy chocolate eggs packed in silver paper and straw, and there was always the “wedding present” showcase, all the year round, with flowery tea sets and Dickens character jugs and cut-crystal violet vases that were to be seen again behind glass in every sitting-room china cabinet on the Mine. Sometimes there were other children whom I knew, waiting for their mothers. Together we stood with our hands and breath pressed against the glass, playing a game that was a child’s earnest and possessive form of window-shopping. “I dabby the pink tea set and the balloon lady and the two dogs. … And the gold dish” was added in triumph, “And I dabby the gold dish!” “No you can’t — I dabbied it first, I said the gold dish the first time!”

Then quite suddenly there was the waiting face at the door, the hand stretched impatiently. “Come on. Come, Helen, I’ve got a lot to do, you know.”

Out in the street little boys as old as I was or younger were selling the local paper, which was published every Saturday morning. They were Afrikaans children mostly, with flat businesslike faces, dull brownish, and cropped brownish hair. Their small dry dirty fingers fumbled the pennies seriously; sometimes you gave them a tickey for the tup-penny paper, and the penny was theirs.

The barefoot boys were soft-footed everywhere, at the market, the railway station, the street corners, outside the bars. And the yellowish paper with its coarse blotting-paper surface on which the black print blurred slightly was rolled up under elbows; stuck out of pockets and baskets; blew at the foot of babies’ prams. My mother would open it in the car, going home, and pass on the news while my father avoided the zigzag of native errand boys, shouting to one another as they rode, and the children waiting bent forward on tiptoe at the curb, ready to run across like startled rabbits at the wrong moment. The Social and Personal columns had the widest possible application and filled two whole pages. Twice I had been mentioned: Congratulations to Helen Shaw, who has passed her Junior Pianoforte examination with 78 marks, and dainty little Helen, daughter of Mrs. G. P. Shaw, who made a charming Alice in Wonderland, and won the Mayoress’s special prize for the best character costume. Each mine had a column to itself, and often “Atherton Mine Notes,” written in a highly playful style by “our special correspondent”—an unidentified but suspected member of the Mine community — mentioned popular or hard-working Mrs. Shaw, wife of our Assistant Secretary. My father’s name was usually in the tennis fixtures for the week, too. I liked to read down the list of names and say out loud my father’s, just as if it were anyone else’s.

Our life was punctuated by the Mine hooter.

It blew at seven in the morning and at noon and at half-past four in the afternoon. The people in the town set their watches by it; the people on the Mine needn’t look at their watches because of it. At midnight on New Year’s Eve its low, cavernous bellow (there was a lonely, stately creature there, echoing its hollow cry down the deep cave beneath the shaft, all along the dark airless passages hollowed out beneath the crust of the town) announced the New Year. Sometimes it lifted its voice at some unaccustomed odd hour of an ordinary day, and people in the town paused a moment and said: “There must’ve been an accident underground.” To women on the Mine it came like the cry of a beast in distress, and it would be something to ask their men when they came home at lunchtime.

For there were very seldom any serious accidents, and few of those that did happen involved white men. Natives were sometimes trapped by a fall of rock from a hanging, and had to be dug out, dead or alive, while the hooter wailed disaster. When a white man was killed, the papers recorded the tragedy, giving his name and occupation and details of the family he left. If no white man was affected, there was an item headed: “FATAL FALL OF HANGING. There was a fall of hanging at the East Shaft of Basilton Levels, East Rand, at 2 P.M. yesterday. Two natives were killed, and three others escaped with minor injuries.”

My father was Assistant Secretary and so never touched the real working life of the Mine that went on underground the way the real life of the body and brain goes on under the surface of flesh. He went down the shaft into the Mine perhaps once or twice a year, part of an official party conducting visitors from the Group — the corporation of mining companies to which the Mine belonged.

The “underground” people we knew — shift bosses and Mine captains and surveyors — had one advantage over us. They were very much luckier with garden boys than my father was. All had their own teams of boys working for them underground; they could detail one, often two or three, to spend a day working in the gardens of their homes. My father had more difficulty. The clerks and errand boys at the office could speak English and write, and were rarely willing to spend their Saturday afternoon off working in our garden, even for money. And they did not belong, the way the Mine boys belonged to their white bosses underground, to my father. He could not send them off to dig a sweet-pea trench or clip a hedge, any more than he could give them a hiding now and then to keep them in order. The underground people found that an occasional good crack, as they put it, knocked any nonsense out of the boys and kept them attentive and respectful, without any malice on either side.

But there was one old boy who had started work as a messenger in the secretary’s office when my father had started there as a junior clerk; now my father was Assistant Secretary and old Paul was still a messenger, and he came still, as he had done since my parents had married, to work in our garden two Saturdays a month.

He was one of the old kind, my mother said. A good old thing. Here you are Paul, she’d say, taking him out a big dish of tea and some meat between thick bread. And she’d stand with one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes, talking to him from the lawn. They talked about bringing up children, and how Paul managed. He had two sons at school in the Northern Transvaal; it was hard, and they did not always know that what their father and mother did for them was best. They wanted to come home to their mother in the Location. But what was the use of that? — That was the beginning of loafers and no-goods, she agreed. If they want to get on nice — Paul’s hand round the bowl of strong tea trembled after the unaccustomed labor of the spade, his small pointed beard held neatly away from the liquid — they must finish Standard Six. — Yes, I know, Paul, but children always think they know better. They must have what they want, and nothing you do is right for them. My wife — he fitted the cold meat carefully between the bread — my wife she say let them come, I mus’ see my children while they still small. It’s no good they should be away and their mother doesn’t know them. — I know, I know, Paul, it’s the same with the master and Miss Helen. I say that the child must do this, because it is good for her, he says let her do that. …

“You’ve been talking to Paul again!” I would taunt. It amused me to see my mother talking to the old gardener just as if he were a friend. Yet there was a touch of scorn in my gibe; other women gave orders to their gardeners, why should my mother talk to hers? “—Honestly, he’s a lot more sensible than a lot of white people,” she would say to my father, as an admittance and a challenge.

Yet I was fond of Paul. I gave him all my discarded games and books for his children, and even my old fairy bicycle, a parting that drew a little string tight inside me, although I did not ride the bicycle any more. He greeted me always as if he were welcoming me back from long absence; a lingering kind of salute, a big smile watching after me as I passed. He fixed things for me, too. And drilled a tiny hole in the shell of a tortoise which, miraculously, he had dug up where it had been hibernating in the dahlia bed, so that I could attach it by a long string to a stake in the lawn. The unexpected discovery of the tortoise was a tremendous excitement, but the pleasure of keeping it as a pet somehow failed to realize. (I had never been back to buy the gold and brown mosaic shell through which I would look at the sun; it had disappeared beneath the overlap of too many impressions of that afternoon, the feeling that something had happened that I didn’t know how to think about.) Now this bitter-mouthed, old-eyed, cold-eyed head and these four dry cold legs feeling slowly out of the shell made me hesitate — froze the impulse of the heart. The fact of the creature, living inside, spoiled the tortoise, domed, gold and brown.

One morning after rain only one neat little segment, the one with the hole in it, lay attached like a label to the long string on the lawn. The tortoise was gone. No one could convince me that it must not have been like pulling one’s nail out by the roots. I kept trying it, secretly, with my thumbnail, and deep guilt humiliated inside me. I felt that the tortoise was someone I had not got to know until too late; now its reproachful face looked out at me from nowhere in the garden.

Chapter 3

On a Sunday morning when I was eleven the hooter went quite suddenly just before breakfast. It seemed to suck in the quiet leisure of early Sunday and blow it out again in alarm.

“Well, what on earth—” My mother’s eyebrows raised in amused indignation. Sunday was the only day she wasn’t dressed and busy long before breakfast, and she came in in her dressing gown, looking inquiringly at my father. “Somebody’s idea of a joke,” he said. He was fixing the plug of the toaster for her. There couldn’t be an accident; most unlikely, anyway, because there was no blasting underground on a Sunday, only the pumps kept going. “Somebody at the time office had too much party last night!” My father made a knowing sound.

I went out into the fresh garden. “You mustn’t go down near the Compound Manager’s,” chorused two little Dufalettes, clinging to the fence and peering through the hedge on their side.

“Why not!” They were silly little things; when nobody at home would listen to them, they would call over the fence.

“My daddy says so. My daddy says nobody must go to the Compound Manager’s, and Raymond was going but now he’s not.”

Raymond came bounding round the corner of their house doing something with a cotton reel and an elastic band. “Man, there’s a whole lota niggers round Ockerts’, all over the garden and in the street and everywhere. Just a lot of munts from the Compound. I was going, but, ag, I don’t want to. My dad’s up there. — Look, haven’t you or your mom got some ole cotton reels you don’t want. I’m’na make a whole army of these tanks out of them, I’m’na have hundreds and hundreds, you’ll see them covering the whole lawn.”

“All right. I’ll ask.” I ran round and in the kitchen door. “There’s a whole crowd of Compound boys in Ockerts’ garden.”

“Who said so?”

“Raymond just told me.”

“Mind you!” My mother stood there lighting upon it. “I thought there was something different this morning — there were no drums! I lay in bed wondering what was different.” Every Sunday morning the Mine, and fainter, more distantly, the town, woke to the gentle, steady beat of drums from the Compound: the boys held war dances, decked in checked dishcloths and feathers from domestic dusters now instead of the skins of beasts and war paint, passing time and getting rid of virility the Mine couldn’t utilize instead of gathering passion for battle; stamping the dust of a piece of veld provided by the Mine instead of their tribal earth. But this morning there were no drums. Only, now that we listened, expecting something, a distant flare of the human voice; there; then blown the other way by the wind.

My father and I went out into the garden to listen. Then out the gate and along the road which the pines held in deep cool dewy shadow. Mr. Bellingan joined us, raising his hand from his veranda. As we got nearer to the Compound Manager’s house, the faint blare grew and separated into the clamor of many voices, high and low, shrill and deep. Now and then, the piercing trill of a whistle shrieked some assertion of its own.

The Compound Manager, by virtue of his position, had a very large garden, laid out with the formality of a park and kept shaved, clipped and pared by bands of Compound boys who were always to be seen squatting like frogs on one lawn or another. Now the gates were open, one facing in toward the house, the other the wrong way, toward the street. About two hundred Mine boys blotted out the green and the color as they sat with their elbows resting on their knees, watching the house, and stood, looking up, packed round the veranda steps. If they had brandished the sticks that most of them carried, now they lay set down beside them; the boys smoked their pipes and stared round in the sun, almost as they did on the veld round the Compound and the stores. Nobody trampled the stars of tight-packed pansies, nobody bent the mound of white lilies that gave out their incense as if convinced they honored a grave. Though some sat beneath scythes of shade cast by the fronds of the palms, none leaned against the monster pineapples of the boles. An immense babble, like a tremendous tea party in full swing, filled the morning.

As I came with my father and Mr. Bellingan a little uncertainly onto the driveway, the way visitors come who are not too certain if they have come at the right time, a few of the boys looked up over their shoulders and then slowly swung their heads back again, like cattle. One was trying to catch a fly that kept flying onto his big mouth as he shouted. Another was not listening at all, quietly exploring his nose. Another one said something about us and laughed.

We saw someone signaling, a beckon and the rather foolish smile of excitement, from the bow window. “Come. It’s Mrs. Ockert.” My father shepherded us toward the house, through the standing groups who clotted more thickly round the veranda, slapping one another’s chests and backs in emphasis of argument, shaking heads and turning this way and that in laughter and disbelief. But they moved aside to let us through, absently. As they moved their blankets stirred the smell of flesh and dust.

Right in the center of the veranda steps a heavy boy in low-slung khaki trousers and an old vest torn down under the arms shouted and moved his big full chest as if that were his form of gesture, curiously expressive, as if it came up out of him without volition. His hair was clipped off bald and showed only as a matt shadow where it would have encroached upon his forehead; beneath the oil of excitement he had a marked, lumpy skin. He was shouting, butting his head at two fat Mine boys who stood about with an air of righteous authority, backed a little away from him, though superior.

We three white people stepped round him onto the veranda. I saw his thick tongue back in his mouth and his big teeth close together and looking strong as he yelled.

Inside in the Ockerts’ long serene lounge — there were silky smooth carpets in intricate designs which were the oriental rugs my mother wanted to get someday, and little black tables with thin legs like baby springbok, looking almost alive, ready to leap — tea had been laid on a wide embroidered cloth, and men stood round talking over thin teacups. Mr. Ockert was laughing something confidentially to the Underground Manager, who wore a dotted red silk scarf folded inside his shirt neck. Thin Mr. Mackenzie hadn’t shaved; he was taking a scone from Mrs. Ockert. “Come on in,” she called to us. “You’ll be wanting some tea, I’m sure. We all need our tea after this!” She was laughing a great deal, rather apologetically, as if this was the best she could put up for an impromptu gathering.

Mrs. Ockert is a woman who could carry off any position; she’s always a charming hostess — my mother often said. — Now there was no sugar left for Mr. Bellingan in the pot-bellied silver bowl. Mrs. Ockert bit her lip and hunched her shoulders gaily in guilt: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bellingan, I’m so sorry. What a house! What chaos this morning!” And she laughed as if it were all her fault, something naughty she had done. “Richard, more sugar at once, please. — It’ll be here in just one moment, Mr. Bellingan—”

“This business of changing the boys’ diet — it always does lead to trouble,” my father was saying to his neighbor, Dufalette. “—No, thanks — Of course, I wouldn’t say it to Ockert, but I’ve seen it time and again. If you’d been giving them boiled rag for years and you changed it to chicken suddenly, they’d be up in arms asking for the rag back again.” Bellingan nodded unsurely in agreement; his eye was on the back of the Underground Manager, standing rather near. He leaned over to put down his cup, taking the opportunity of saying quietly in my father’s ear, “All this to-do over mealie-pap.” My father laughed tightly inside his chest: “A storm in a porridge pot, a storm in a porridge pot.”

“What about another scone? Come on? What about another scone?” Mrs. Ockert was smiling round the room. “These flies! As soon as they’re anywhere around you can be sure they’ll bring millions of flies.”

“They soon quietened down when Ockert came out,” someone was saying. “I was here early, as soon as I saw them crowding along the road toward the house. — Yes, before eight — they came marching along; I tell you, quite a sight!”

“But why come to the house? They could have complained through the boss-boys?”

“The boss-boys!”

“Oh, the Compound Manager or nothing!”

“Did you hear it all, Mac?”

“Well, there’ll be nothing more said now. They won’t make any trouble.”

“Behind it? I shouldn’t say there was, at all.”

The Assistant Compound Manager went out, came in again. “Starting to push off now,” he said, assuring, belittling, comforting, the way one stands between a child and the undesirable, insistingly smiling, “all on their way.”

Soon we left, too, passing the dwindling groups of natives, the emptying garden; my father holding my hand but talking closely to Mr. Bellingan and not knowing I was there.

The boys at the Compound didn’t like the food they were given, and so they all came together to Mr. Ockert’s house to complain. Now they were going back to the Compound and they were glad because, although they had behaved badly, Mr. Ockert wasn’t taking their Sunday ration of kaffir beer away from them. Between the two men talking above my head I heard the word “strike”; “—But it wasn’t a strike, was it?” I said quickly. My father smiled down at me. “Well, yes, it was, really. They didn’t refuse to work, but they wouldn’t eat; that’s a strike, too.” He had told me often about the 1922 strike of white miners, when there were shots in the streets of Atherton, and my grandmother, his mother, had stayed shut up in her little house for days, until the commando of burghers came riding in to restore order. To me the word “strike” carried with it visions of excitement and danger; something for which, alas, I had been born too late.

Those native boys sitting around making a noise the way they liked to in the garden, and the lovely tea all ready in Mrs. Ockert’s beautiful lounge (the scones collapsed into hot butter; I should have liked one more)—That couldn’t be a strike—?

Hunger was whistling an empty passage right down my throat to my stomach. — I twisted my hand out of my father’s and ran on ahead, to bacon and egg put away for me in the oven.

Chapter 4

My adolescence and the first years of the war were concurrent; both have a haziness in my mind that comes, I suppose, from the indefinite, cocoonlike quality of the one, and the distant remove from my life of the other.

During that time my life was so much my mother’s that it seemed that the only difference between us was the insignificance of age. The significance of emotional experience that separates the woman, mated, her life balanced against the life of a man, that life again balanced against the life of a child begotten and born, from the girl-child, was as unrealized by my mother as by me. My mother, with her slightly raw-featured still-young face — the blood flowed very near the surface of the thin skin — accepted marriage and motherhood as a social rather than a mysterious personal relationship. Wives and husbands and children and the comfortable small plan of duties they owed to one another — for her, this was what living was. I accepted the outward everyday semblance of adult life, the men father-familiar yet creatures respected and allowed ununderstandable tastes of their own; ministered to because they were the providers and entitled to affection from their own families; women the friends, the co-workers, the companions, busy with one another in the conduct of every hour of the day. My mother’s weeks were pegged out to street collections and galas and dances and cake sales and meetings of this committee and that — remote from battlefields or air raids, with my father’s stomach ulcer excluding him from offering his services to South Africa’s volunteer forces, this was what the war meant in our lives. Outside of school, I too belonged to this busy to-and-fro that went on above the tunneling of black men and white in the Mine. I too had my place, the place of the Secretary’s daughter (my father had been promoted at last), in the hierarchy that divided the Mine Manager and his wife (tall in a clinging skirt, an exiled Mrs. Dalloway) giving the prizes in a certain order of rigid gradations from the busy small woman in the flowered apron stationed at the tea urn — wife of a burly shift boss called Mackie.

I read the books my mother brought home on her adult’s ticket at the library; gentle novels of English family life and, now and then, stray examples of the proletarian novel to which the dole in England in the thirties had given rise. “It’s about the life of the poor in England — but it won’t do her any harm if she wants to read it.”—My mother was sometimes a little uncertain about these books. “I don’t believe a girl should grow up not knowing what life is like.”

A young man and a girl went up on a refuse heap above an ugly city and kissed. There was a drunken father who was horrible in an indefinable way — but all drunk people were horrible, I should have died of fear if … but it could not even be imagined that my father could dribble at the mouth, vomit without knowing. At the same time I read Captain Marryat, Jane Austen, and to Omar Khayyam in its soft skin-feel cover I had added Rupert Brooke. “She’s like us,” said my mother, “we’re both great readers. Of course, George likes his heavy stuff, medical books and so on — and detective stories! I don’t know how he can read them, but I’ve got to bring them home for him every week end.” A book of Churchill’s speeches and another of Smuts’ found a place on top of the special little bookcase which contained the encyclopedia; my father had bought them. The clean-cut shiny dust covers slowly softened at the edges as Anna dusted them along with the other ornaments every day.

There was a dance, I remember, when I was about sixteen — to raise money for a special comforts-fund that the Mine had inaugurated for ex-employees now in the forces. My mother said, blushing with pleasure, the almost tearful moisture that came to her eyes when she was proud: “Daddy, this’ll mean a long dress for your daughter. …”

My mother was completely absorbed in the making of that dress; we were up together late every night before the dance, while she sewed and fitted, and I stood on the table with my head near the heat of the light in its beaded shade, turning slowly to show how the hem fell. Then before we went to bed we sat on the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking. I had taken over the care of my mother’s fine wiry hair, red, like my own: “You can have it set at the hairdresser’s on the Thursday before — then it’ll be nice and soft for me to do up for you on Saturday.” My mother thought a moment. “But on Thursday afternoon I’ve promised to bake four-dozen sausage rolls. I don’t want to get all steamy in the kitchen after it’s been done.” “Tie it up! Why can’t you tie it up!” I stacked the cups in the sink for Anna in the morning.

Up and down the passage, in the bathroom, snatches of our talk continued until the lights went out.

We dressed for the dance together. My mother had surprised me with a real florist’s corsage — they called it a “spray”—pink carnations and pale blue delphinium, and it was pinned to the shoulder of my dress with its silver paper holder just showing. Every time I turned my head I could feel it brush my neck.

I danced with Raymond Dufalette in a blue suit with his hair so oiled that it looked as if he had just come out of the sea, dripping wet. He went to boarding school and had learned to dance the previous term; he brought me thankfully back to where my mother and father sat, ready with kindly questions about how he liked school and what he was going to do when he was finished. Then I sat, my back very stiff, looking straight before me. I was afraid I was perspiring the little organdy balloon that encased the lop of each arm. I was still more afraid that my father might ask me to dance to save me.

I remember that just as I was getting desperate, a fair boy astonishingly came right across the splintered boards to ask me to dance, and the dance was a Paul Jones, so that I found myself with a succession of partners, snatched away when the music broke into a march and I walked sheepishly round with the other girls — there was Olwen, but Olwen had come with a partner, and he kept her, swaying at the side — then replaced by the young man or somebody’s father who found himself opposite me when the march ended. The evening passed in the stiff hands of thin fair boys whose necks were too free of stiff collars. Their knees bumped me, hard as table legs. Their black evening suits and the crackle of shirt front encased nothingness, like the thin glossy shells, the fine glass wings of beetles which crunch to a puff of dead leaf-powder if you crush them. When the ice cream was served I ran hand in hand with my mother; we had promised to help. Over in the corner at the bar, the two Cluff boys in uniform leaned with one or two other soldiers home for the week end. They drank beer, and laughter spurted up in their talk, backs to the dancers. “Ice cream?” I held out the tray of saucers, smiling with impartial polite reserve, not knowing whether or not I should recognize them as Alan and Francis Cluff.

“Here boys, ice cream, why not—” Alan began passing the saucers over my head. Francis said in an aside, his eyes lowered for a moment as if to screen him, “Hello, Helen.” The smell of war, of young men taken in war, a disturbing mixture and contradiction of the schoolboy smell of soap in khaki, and the smooth scent of shaven skin, the warmth of body that brought out the smell of khaki as the warmth of the iron brings up the odor of a fabric, came from them.

I danced again and again that year at parties with the fair young boys in their formal dress clothes who, like myself, were in their last year at school. Once or twice in the winter holidays, one of them took me to the cinema on a Saturday night; but I was only sixteen, I was busy studying for my matriculation, there was plenty of time. “Time enough when you’re working and independent, and school’s behind you,” said my mother. — Olwen had left school a year ago; she attended what was called a business college, upstairs in a building in the town; the chakker-chakker of typewriters sailed out of the wide-open windows and at lunchtime the girls came down to stroll about the town, not in gym frocks, but their own choice of dresses.

What was the stiffness that congealed in me and in the bodies of the young boys with the spiky-smooth hair beside me in the sinking dark of the cinema; made me sit up straight, my arms arranged along the rests helplessly when the lights went up and the music rose and the colored advertisements flipped one by one on and off the screen, and I waited? Back came the young boy with two little cardboard buckets of ice cream, edging bent, apologetic, along the row. We sat and ate with wooden spoons; the boy kept asking questions: Shall I put that down for you? Can you manage? Is it melted? Did it get on your dress? It seemed that I did nothing but smile, shake my head, assure, no. We spoke of films we had seen, veered back to school, fell back on anecdotes that began: “Well I know, I have an Uncle who told us once …”or “—Like my little brother; the other day he was …” Sudden bursts of sympathy ignited, like matches struck by mistake, between us; were batted out with the astonishment that instinctively deals with such fires. He had not read the books I had read; I knew that. He talked a great deal about the different models of motorcars. My jaws felt tight and I wanted to yawn.

We sat seriously through the film. Sometimes the young boy’s foot would touch mine by mistake — they had such big feet in shoes with thick rubber soles — and there was a ruffle of apologies. The one — the nicer one, actually — had a crenelation of incipient pimples perpetually lying in anger beneath the tender shaven skin along his jaw, to which, in the imagined privacy of the dark, I always saw, out of the corner of my eye, his fingers return feeling along as if reading the bumps in the tender, disgusting language of adolescence; curt, monosyllabic as obscenity, and as searching.

At this time, too, my father was teaching me to play golf. When the hooter went at half-past four I left my books open on the dining-room table and went into my room to put on rubber-soled shoes. My father came home with the air of expectancy of someone who is waiting to go out again immediately, and we were at the first tee just as the sun shifted its day-long gaze and glanced obliquely off the grass. Afterward I sat on the veranda full of Mine officials at the clubhouse, drinking my orange squash at a rickety wicker table, with my father sipping his beer. Our heads were continually turned to talk to people; often two or three men screeched chairs over the cement to sit with us, others would swing a leg against the table while they paused to talk in passing. Even if their talk veered to channels that slowly excluded me, leaving me at some point gently washed upon the limit of my comprehension or interest, I rested there comfortably, hearing their voices rather than what they said, lulled by the warm throbbing coming up in my scarlet, blistered palms. I lolled my head back, put my dusty feet up on the bar of the table; the sky, swept clear of the day, held only radiance, far up above the shade that rose like water steeping the trees and the drop of the grass. Over at the water hole, the whole world was repeated, upside down. It all seemed simple, as if a puzzle had dissolved in my hands. The half-questions would never be asked, dark fins of feeling that could not be verified in the face of my father, my mother, the Mine officials, would not show through the surface that every minute of every day polished. I rested, my foot dancing a little tune; the way the unborn rest between one stage of labor and the next, thinking, perhaps, that they have arrived.