Showed her a while ago a fossil that Pa picked up way back in the mountains & now she’s got a thing about it, is forever picking up rocks & says break it open there’s something in it & then upon my word she’s been right three or four times! How do you know? I ask. Some stones are warmer than others she says. Can it be that the child has second sight? Arrived here the other day with a little frog, didn’t even know such a thing existed tiny as a match-head, micro-frog according to the amphibians book & today again the loveliest little ivory frog. First had to explain ivory & then how an elephant’s tooth made its way to the name of a frog.
Mole snake, fruit bat, horse-shoe, tapeworm, finch-grass, drift-sand, smother-crop, cannibal spider, emperor butterfly. Soon discovered compounds don’t always work in the same way, sometimes had to think up something to satisfy her.
So then I had this bright idea, a fortunate inspiration it was, or not even that, a premonition & I looked under Agate in Pa’s old minerals book & there it was! Remarkable! Cloud agate Plume agate Fire agate Eye agate Iris agate Snakeskin agate Moss agate Rainbow agate! Look, I say, all the world is in your name. The things of the world are tied to one another at all points with words I say & we know one thing through the name of another thing & we join the names together. It’s a chain & if you move one link then they all move the possibilities are endless.
She wants to go & catch that blue butterfly, she says, for hr collection. I say you don’t catch it it’s holy. She’s not scared of butterflies she says they don’t bite what is holy. I said I’d think. Full of that kind of question nowadays. Where is heaven, why do people die, where is one’s soul attached, why is a thing the thing that it is & not another thing. Heaven is a stone she says out of the blue. Yes I say precious stone walls of jasper & streets of gold. No she says that’s not what she means & she shows me the stone with the fossilised fern leaf. That’s the soul she says trapped in heaven, I ask you!
In the evenings she unpacks all our finds & arranges them by kind. Can’t keep up with dishes & bottles boxes bands & scrapbooks & felt squares, pins, thumb tacks, paper clips for all the specimens she wants to display. Remarkably precise & persistent the child, it’s exceptional I think. I give her a free hand even though it smells like a witchdoctor’s shop there in her little room. Saar & Lietja say she was born with the caul. What an adventure!
7 June ’55
This afternoon after lunch A. disappeared into thin air & returned very dirty. Had actually walked to the forest on hr own! I gave hr a good hiding. The tokoloshe will catch you, I said it’s no place for little children remember your name is Good. Good, she says crying, one good two goods, goods is loose goods she says crying & and goods are a lot of things that don’t have a name & goods are your goods that you have in your suitcase, stolen goods. Not at a loss for words. I tell hr look out you don’t talk back at me do you want another hiding? Good is true good is beautiful good is noble.
8 June ’55
What all are you writing in your little book? asks Agaat. A story, I say, about a little girl who can whistle already! Can I too? she asks. Here she is now taking the red crayon!
I rite in my meme’s boke.
I lov hir verry mutch.
My one hand is big and the uther is smal,
She lovs me verry mutch to.
Let’s spell properly:
write
book
love
her
very
much
other
small
too
She’s speaking good Afrikaans now. Only the infinitive of the verb in combination with preposition creates problems at times. To about laugh, she says, to about cry.
10 June 1955
I put up all the pictures she draws on the walls of her room, two eagle owls on a branch, a red princess with a crown on her head, a bristling black cat on yellow paper. The child amazes me. Looks at me the other day when we were having a picnic under the big old rock fig: Why can a tree only be a tree? Because it’s holy I say. What is holy? she asks again. I say everything that’s wild everything that’s free, everything that we didn’t make ourselves, everything that we can’t cling to & tie down. Your soul is holy. Wouldn’t she gaze at me: But you caught me & tamed me. So I pressed hr close to me, shame.
12 July 1955
Baked a pretty birthday cake with seven candles collected a whole boxful of little reading books from everybody who no longer uses them nicely wrapped in shiny paper & a ribbon but then there was another incident ai, one of the children I invited apparently mocked A. so she locked him in the outside toilet & he bawled the place down. Gave her a terrific hiding more because she refuses to tell me what he’s supposed to have said to her that made her lock him up. You tell me everything, you don’t have secrets from me I tell her, only good secrets you’re allowed that the Lord knows about.
16 September 1955
Just saw something that breaks my heart. Heard just now back there in the kitchen the red-chested cuckoo in the front garden but it carries on & on & and I go & look here on the front stoep to see where they’re nesting & all the time it was A. standing on the stoep all concentration. Every time he calls she whistles back wheet-wheet-wooee & then she waits until he replies, the little face sheer wonder, she can’t believe what’s happening. Just left again quietly because I could see it was a very private moment & thus far she hasn’t breathed a word of it to me. She goes around with I-have-a-secret written all over her face.
17 April 1956
All the drilling every day has not been in vain, A. really coming along so nicely in reading & writing. Saw her today sitting there & spelling out the stories in the Children’s Bible, asks me a big word every now & again: Righteousness, compassion, hallucination, ire, damnation, grace. I write them all down, nicely split up in syllables & put them up in her room next to her other lists so that she can absorb them. Have done memorising & summarising exercises and comprehension tests with her a few times. She’s not stupid at all, I tend to keep it to the Farmer’s Weekly & to farming matters that she knows. Hmmm, says Jak, teach the young idea how to shoot. Sarcastic as always.
3 May 1956
A. has the habit of just disappearing. Give her a hiding regularly but she carries on doing it. Had to scold like anything again yesterday. What do you do when you run off, what kind of mischief do you get up to? I dig she says. I look at the nails, I see the soil. What do you dig! I ask. Little furrows she says. What kind of little furrows? For seed, she says. Then a great light dawned for me about the fennel that’s shooting up everywhere in the garden & in the yard & next to the irrigation furrow & the orchard all the way to beyond the dirt road in the dryland I noticed the yellow heads of fennel in flower. You’re infesting the place! I say, you’re making work for yourself, you’ll pull up every last bush! I won’t she says they’re my plants. Impossible at times the child, wonder how long she’s been at it. Yes says Jak, Minister of Fennel one day.